Question

Outline key problems that are hindering the development progress in Brazil; Develop a strategy for addressing the problems. Then outline a methodology for quantitative evaluation of the success of your proposed strategy.

Answer 1

Brazil - Economic Growth and Development :

Background on Brazil

• Brazil is an upper middle income country in South America with a population of 195 million people
• Gross National Income (GNI) per capita in 2010 was $9,390 – this was well above the upper middle income average of $5,884 – can Brazil (one of the BRIC countries) escape the middle-income trap?
• Brazil has one of the highest rates of urbanisation in the world with 87% of the total population living in urban areas compared to a 57% average for upper middle nations
• Life expectancy at birth is 73 years, 91% of the population aged 15 and over is literate
• Brazil hosted the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games – both events have required a huge rise in investment spending to boost Brazilian infrastructure and tourist facilities
• Brazil's main trading partners are China (15%), the USA (10% of exports) and Argentina (9%)
• Brazilian transnational corporations are becoming increasingly prominent in the world economy. In 2011, Petrobas was ranked 5^thin the world by market capitalisation
• Agriculture contributed heavily to Brazilian growth – the value of output in Brazil's agricultural industry, nearly quadrupled between 1996 and 2006, and the country is now one of the world's largest net exporters of grain, soybeans, beef, oil and iron ore.
• Brazil is the world's biggest exporter of chicken, orange juice, coffee and sugar! It runs a trade surplus in farm output with China and India.
• Brazil's agriculture sector is one of the world's biggest users of GM technologies
• The country runs a current account deficit, largely because Brazil is a heavy importer of consumer goods especially from China and the United States

Progress in improving human development in Brazil

Since the mid-1990s, social progress has been steady, with a fall in extreme poverty and income and wealth inequality. Brazil has been one of the few fast-growing countries to have seen the Gini coefficient decline in the last fifteen years. That said the scale of inequality in Brazil is enormous.

Year	Brazil	High human development	Latin America and the Caribbean	World
2011	0.72	0.74	0.73	0.68
2005	0.69	0.72	0.70	0.66

Despite progress, the poorest 10% of the Brazilian population take a tiny share of national income

Structural change in the Brazilian economy

• During the last twenty years, the share of GDP from agriculture has fallen from 8.1% in 1990 to 5.8% in 2010. Manufacturing has just 16% of Brazilian GDP.
• Brazil has been called by some economists a “commodity country" vulnerable to the effects of a natural resource curse, but now Brazil is attempting to build competitive advantage in high value-added manufacturing, tourism and other service industries.
• Brazil's future progress is constrained by a number of weaknesses including high taxes, a tendency towards import protectionism, weak infrastructure, corruption, crime, and dominant monopolies. In Rio, the public transport network is the city's most serious infrastructure problem. The city and its 6.1 million populations have just one underground train line.

Poverty Reduction Policies in Brazil

• The Brazilian government has invested heavily in anti-poverty programmes over the last ten to fifteen years and has lauded as an example of a country where a well-designed combination of policies can have a significant effect. The percentage of the Brazilian population in extreme poverty has fallen from 23% in 1993 to 8.3% in 2009, and Brazil has achieved its own Millennium Development Goal to cut back extreme poverty in 2015 to ¼ of the level experienced in 1990 – this target was achieved in 2007.
• Much remains to be done for despite sustained economic growth, Brazil remains a highly unequal country and sixteen million people continue to experience extreme poverty living below the $1.25 per day UN benchmark. That said Brazil has seen their Gini coefficient fall by 9% between 2011 and 2009.

The poverty-reduction programme has been built around focusing on:

• 1.Increasing the percentage of adults in formal work
• 2.Raising school enrolment rates
• 3.Raising incomes for people in work (targeting the working poor)
• 4.Boosting the non-labour income of Brazil's poorest through an ambitious income transfer scheme known as Bolsa Familia

Bolsa Familia – conditional cash benefits targeting the poorest families

• Bolsa Familia is an income transfer (or Family Benefit) programme established in 2003 which in 2011 reached more than a quarter of Brazil's 190 million population. It provides small conditional cash transfers to families, the payments are conditional on families sending their children to school, completing immunization schemes and attending post-natal care services. Total benefits amount to slightly more than 0.4 per cent of Brazil's GDP and slightly less than 0.7 per cent of household income. This is a key point; the benefits paid are small which makes them less open to fraud. In addition to cash, in-kind benefits such as nutritional supplements can supplied.
• Bolsa Familia targets poorer families, provides transfer payments for older people and has been extended to paying rural pensions. This programme is an example of targeting cash transfers to those in greatest need, but linking payments to families engaging with educational and other social policies. Mexico is another country that has used conditional cash transfers. Chile and Columbia have used this strategy too.

Tackling Poverty: Productive Inclusion of the Poor

• A third key part of the poverty-reduction policy in Brazil is to invest in education and training to build up human capital. Secondly to offer guaranteed minimum working conditions for people who work in formal labour markets. The government also provides subsidies to certain groups, for example subsidies to rural farmers to encourage production and exporting their surplus production to Brazilian urban areas.
• Lifting educational outcomes is crucial to this long term anti-poverty strategy and some progress is being made. Illiteracy rates within young people aged 15-24 has fallen from 7.1% in 1995 to 1.9% in 2009. Attendance rates for children aged 6-14 years have grown from 88.7% in 1995 to 97.6% in 2009, and 85.2% of youths aged 15-17 remain in education. 62% of children complete primary education, 44% finishes their secondary schooling and 10% get through tertiary courses

Quantitative Assessment Methods:

• Quantitative methods use numbers for interpreting data (Maki, 2004) and \"are distinguished by emphasis on numbers, measurement, experimental design, and statistical analysis\" (Palomba & Banta 1999). Large numbers of cases may be analyzed using quantitative design, and this type of design is deductive in nature, often stemming from a preconceived hypothesis (Patton, 2002).
• The potential to generalize results to a broader audience and situations make this type of research/assessment design popular with many. Although assessment can be carried out with the rigor of traditional research, including a hypothesis and results that are statistically significant, this is not a necessary component of programmatic outcomes-based assessment. It is not essential to have a certain sample size unless the scope of your assessment is on the institutional level.
• A traditionally favored type of research design that has influenced outcomes-based assessment methodology is quantitative assessment. Quantitative assessment offers a myriad of data collection tools including structured interviews, questionnaires, and tests.
• In the higher education setting, this type of design is found in many nationally employed assessment tools (e.g., National Survey of Student engagement, Community College survey of Student Engagement, and the CORE Institute Alcohol and Drug Survey) but can also be locally developed and used to assess more specific campus needs and student learning outcomes. It is important when engaging in quantitative methodological design, sampling, analysis, and interpretation to ensure that those individuals involved are knowledgeable about, as well as comfortable with, engaging in quantitative design (Palomba & Banta, 1999).
• At Colorado State University, two primary quantitative assessment methods are used to examine apartment life on campus. \"The Apartment Life Exit Survey is given to residents as they begin the 'vacate' process from their apartment. Results are tabulated twice each year, once at the end of fall semester and once in the summer\" (Bresciani et al., in press).
• Administrators at Pennsylvania State University originally measured the success of their newspaper readership program based on satisfaction and use. The quantitative survey they were using was later revised \"to include more detailed information on students' readership behavior (e.g., how frequently they are reading a paper, how long, and which sections), students' engagement on campus and in the community, and their self-reported gains in various outcomes (e.g., developing an understanding of current issues, expanding their vocabulary, articulating their views on issues, increasing their reading comprehension)\" (Bresiani et al., 2009). This revision allowed them to use survey methodology while still measuring the impact of the program on student learning.
• CSUS underwent a similar revision process of a locally developed quantitative survey looking at its new student orientation program. Originally, only student and parent satisfaction were measured. This was later revised to include a true/false component in the orientation evaluation that used a form of indirect assessment. In the final revision, a pre-and post-test were administered to those students attending orientation to measure the knowledge gained in the orientation session (Bresciani et al., 2009).
• In addition, a great deal of data already contained in student transactional systems can be used to assist in the evaluation of programs. Data such as facility usage, service usage, adviser notations, participation in student organizations, leadership role held, and length of community service can all help in explaining why outcomes may have been met.
• For instance, staff at an institution's counseling service desire for all students who are treated for sexually transmitted diseases to be able to identify the steps and strategies to avoid contracting them before leaving the 45-minute office appointment. However, when they evaluated this, they learned that only 70% of the students were able to do this, but they also examined their office appointment log and realized that because of the high volume of patients, they were only able to spend 27 minutes with each student on average. The decreased intended time to teach students about their well-being may explain why the counseling staff's results were lower than they would have desired.

Develop strategies:

WHAT IS A STRATEGY?:

• A strategy is a way of describing how you are going to get things done. It is less specific than an action plan (which tells the who-what-when); instead, it tries to broadly answer the question, "How do we get there from here?" (Do we want to take the train? Fly? Walk?)
• A good strategy will take into account existing barriers and resources (people, money, power, materials, etc.). It will also stay with the overall vision, mission, and objectives of the initiative. Often, an initiative will use many different strategies--providing information, enhancing support, removing barriers, providing resources, etc.--to achieve its goals.
• Objectives outline the aims of an initiative--what success would look like in achieving the vision and mission. By contrast, strategies suggest paths to take (and how to move along) on the road to success. That is, strategies help you determine how you will realize your vision and objectives through the nitty-gritty world of action.

WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPING A GOOD STRATEGY?

Strategies for your community initiative should meet several criteria.

Does the strategy:

• Give overall direction? A strategy, such as enhancing experience and skill or increasing resources and opportunities, should point out the overall path without dictating a particular narrow approach (e.g., using a specific skills training program).
• Fit resources and opportunities? A good strategy takes advantage of current resources and assets, such as people's willingness to act or a tradition of self-help and community pride. It also embraces new opportunities such as an emerging public concern for neighborhood safety or parallel economic development efforts in the business community.
• Minimize resistance and barriers? When initiatives set out to accomplish important things, resistance (even opposition) is inevitable. However, strategies need not provide a reason for opponents to attack the initiative. Good strategies attract allies and deter opponents.
• Reach those affected? To address the issue or problem, strategies must connect the intervention with those who it should benefit. For example, if the mission of the initiative is to get people into decent jobs, do the strategies (providing education and skills training, creating job opportunities, etc.) reach those currently unemployed?
• Advance the mission? Taken together, are strategies likely to make a difference on the mission and objectives? If the aim is to reduce a problem such as unemployment, are the strategies enough to make a difference on rates of employment? If the aim is to prevent a problem, such as substance abuse, have factors contributing to risk (and protection) been changed sufficiently to reduce use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs?

WHY DEVELOP STRATEGIES?

Developing strategies is really a way to focus your efforts and figure out how you're going to get things done. By doing so, you can achieve the following advantages:

• Taking advantage of resources and emerging opportunities
• Responding effectively to resistance and barriers
• A more efficient use of time, energy, and resources

WHEN SHOULD YOU DEVELOP STRATEGIES FOR YOUR INITIATIVE?

• Developing strategies is the fourth step in the VMOSA (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Action Plans) process outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Developing strategies is the essential step between figuring out your objectives and making the changes to reach them. Strategies should always be formed in advance of taking action, not deciding how to do something after you have done it. Without a clear idea of the how, your group's actions may waste time and effort and fail to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Strategies should also be updated periodically to meet the needs of a changing environment, including new opportunities and emerging opposition to the group's efforts.

HOW DO YOU DEVELOP STRATEGIES?

• Once again, let's refer back to our friends at the fictional Reducing the Risk (RTR) Coalition that hopes to reduce the risk of teenage pregnancy in its community. We'll walk through the process of developing strategies with this group so as to better explain the who, what, and why of strategies.
• As with the process you went through to write your vision and mission statements and to set your objectives, developing strategies involves brainstorming and talking to community members.