In 2022, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) completes 70 years. With the brand, the public development bank decided to face an old challenge and invest in education.
The agency’s work will be focused on providing infrastructure for public education networks and, in this first cycle, it is concentrated in the semi-arid northeast and in the Amazon.
There will be four initiatives, carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Education. The bank intends to use the new High School, which has 40% of the content formed by elective courses, to stimulate the bioeconomy in the region.
Each state pointed out value chains to be developed based on studies and research that will support new courses, which will be internalized and offered by educational institutions in the region.
Among the possibilities are fish farming, tourism, açaí, chestnut, forest management, superfoods and pharmaceuticals, for example. Bruno Aranha, director of productive and socio-environmental credit at BNDES, explains the action.
“From the training of teachers and the inclusion of courses, we believe that (the result) will reach the end and train young people and they will not leave the region. They will remain in it, they will undertake, generate jobs in the bioeconomy, and we will reconcile social inclusion, economic development and environmental preservation, with the maintenance of the forest standing”, he evaluates.
The Sanitation in Schools program aims to bring basic sanitation to 450 schools in the Marajó macro-region, in Pará. An area that covers 16 municipalities, reaching 13 thousand students.
The action will be based on matchfunding, a model through which BNDES will finance R$ 20 million, and private partners will be responsible for another R$ 28 million, and will act as a pilot for the implementation of a similar program on a national scale.
If, in the North, the problem is the lack of sanitation, in the Northeast the challenge is water supply. Cisternas nas Escolas intends to allocate R$ 40 million, in partnership with the Ministry of Citizenship and the Banco do Brasil Foundation, to make the offer reach another two or three thousand schools in the northeastern semi-arid region, benefiting between 110 thousand and 160 thousand students. , as explained to CNN Bruno Aranha, director of productive and socio-environmental credit at BNDES.
“Water at school means that the student will have his food. Because without water, there will be no food at school. From this, we believe that other waves of infrastructure and training need to be carried out. For example, giving schools access to energy. A distributed energy, solar, for example. After that, log in with internet access”, explains Aranha.
The public notice for the Marajó sanitation program is scheduled for this week, as well as for education returning to the bioeconomy, according to the BNDES. Water in Schools is scheduled to be launched in May.
The other initiative, Connected Education, which aims to bring internet to schools, is the most structured so far and has an estimated cost of R$ 28 million.
The objective is, in addition to bringing the network to classrooms and using them in everyday teaching and learning, to use them to boost the qualification of teachers and to work on the formatting of teaching materials.
According to the BNDES, Brazil works with an annual budget for education of R$ 360 billion, in the three spheres: municipal, state and federal.
According to the agency’s understanding, there is no shortage of resources for the area: it would only be necessary to improve the quality of public spending to achieve improvements.
The resources come from the BNDES’ Socio-environmental Fund, a non-reimbursable financial support instrument, which aims to help the agency achieve its goal of becoming the bank for Brazilian sustainable development.
The fund is open to the presentation of projects aimed at the administrative training of education professionals and the production of teaching materials. In two calls already made, R$ 170 million will be allocated to projects selected for these purposes.
In February, the development bank announced that it had recorded a record profit in 2021: R$34.1 billion. The amount exceeds the entire budget approved for the city of Rio de Janeiro, where it is headquartered, for the whole of that year: R$ 31.2 billion
. The result was driven by the sale of equity interests in the investment portfolio, which included the trading of shares in Vale, Klabin and JBS.
Source: CNN Brasil

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