The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: Thank you very much.
(Speaking Spanish)
>> NICOLAS FIUMARELLI: We will do a ‑‑ we won't do English translation, but don't worry, we will do the translation later. I will be speaking in Spanish also.
(Speaking Spanish)
>> JULIA: Hello, everyone. Thank you, first of all, for having me here. My name is Julia. I'm a participant. I was a Fellow of the Youth Brazil Program and now I'm a mentor. And I'm a Brazilian lawyer, currently pursuing a Master's degree at the School of Economics. And I just wanted to present how the youth program in Brazil works and maybe talk a little bit about our challenges and also positive outcomes that we have been having lately.
So, the Youth Brazil is an initiative by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee. The format that we have today started back in 2016, so it's been a while. It's a yearly program, so we've had around six editions so far. And it's addressed to Brazilians between 18 and 25 years old.
The program's organized in two stages. So, we have first, a capacity‑building that lasts around four weeks, and then some of the participants are selected to take part in national and international events. So, we take them to Brazilian IGF, LACIGF and the IGF, the International IGF. So, the idea is to introduce these young people to Internet Governance and to prepare them to engage among other young people, but also to propose solutions, like Nicolas said, and actively participate and engage in the Internet Governance community on different regional levels. I think it's sort of a differential aspect of the Brazilian Youth programs that we take them to the national level, the regional level, and international events.
So, how it works. We have first a capacity‑building program that lasts for four weeks. There are four thematic weeks, and we present them with different kinds of content and also different formats of content. So, we present them with maybe academic papers about the history of Internet or about infrastructure, but also about hot topics that have been discussed regarding regulation or other issues. And –- sorry -- and also, maybe presenting them with videos from past IGF sessions and so on. So, they can have that initial contact with Internet Governance, or if they're already somehow engaged, that is also an opportunity for them to maybe broaden or deepen their knowledge on the subject.
Something that is also very special about the Brazilian Youth program is that we have many diversity criteria that I think it's really important, especially in a country as big and diverse as Brazil. So, it's very relevant that we have representatives of different regions and genders. So, we have gender criteria, race, region, but also, the object of their study or work, which means not only that we want to have people representing the private sector, the public sector, academia, and Civil Society, but also, we want people from different areas, so social sciences, the technical community, and so on.
And talk a little bit about the positive outcomes and balancing that with the challenges that we've been having. So far, we have had over 850 people that have been through the capacity‑building stage, so that's quite a lot of people. And around 120 of those were selected to participate in national and international events. We see that most Fellows increasingly engage in Internet Governance issues, and they may actually pivot their careers to be more active in the field. And we see a lot of success cases of people who have achieved strategic positions and are actively working in positions of leadership. So, we have a lot of representatives in the public sector. For instance, we have former youth fellows in the Brazilian Data Protection Authority, as well as the private sector. We have some very renowned Brazilian researchers who started off as Youth Fellows. So, and actually, many of them are here today that were Fellows maybe in 2016, in our first edition, and are back here representing other institutions and so on.
But even though we consider the program to be extremely successful in engaging young people and being that first contact with Internet Governance, it does not come without challenges. So, we can maybe discuss that little bit further afterwards, but I just wanted to maybe name a few to get the ball rolling. Because Brazil is so big and diverse, like I mentioned, we have diversity criteria, but it's difficult to reach some areas. So, we saw this year, being a facilitator, that it was really difficult, for instance, to reach out to people in the north of Brazil and even in the center‑west region. So, we have had that sort of difficulty in the past. And also some areas. We see that the technical community is underrepresented among the fellows because we have a hard time reaching out to them, but we are working on that and we see that their participation are actually increasing.
So, well, yes, just another thing that I think connects with what Nicolas said, is another challenge, I think, is engaging with other youth initiatives in Latin America and internationally. So, yeah, I think that was just an initial overview of how the program works, and I think we can maybe dive a little deeper afterwards.
>> NICOLAS FIUMARELLI: Thank you so much, Julia. Returning to Spanish.
(Speaking Spanish)
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: To our friends that are helping us with the coordination, we now are going to –-
(Speaking Spanish)
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: Perhaps we need to allow him to open his mic?
(Speaking Spanish)
>> NICOLAS FIUMARELLI: Can we please give him authorization? His name is Augusto Mathurin.
(Speaking Spanish)