Tourism and Social Responsibility

For three years, in partnership with Brazil's Instituto de Hospitalidade, Counterpart International (Counterpart) implemented the training, mentoring and employment aspects at an At-Risk Youth Program in Salvador, Bahia to provide technical training in the tourism fields of lodging, travel, food and beverage and entrepreneurship. Counterpart and Instituto de Hospitalidade worked in close collaboration with the Government of Brazil, private sector tourism associations and corporate and local businesses to design curriculum and internship programs that provided youth ages 16 – 25 with training and mentoring that led to entry level jobs. In its first year, the program successfully trained and facilitated job placement in the tourism industry for approximately 450 at-risk youth from Salvador.
 
The model program in Salvador has been recognized as one of the best at-risk youth training programs in Brazil and has been adopted by the Brazilian Ministry of Education as a national strategy to fight poverty and provide job skills to at-risk youth in urban slums throughout the country. The International Youth Foundation, USAID and the IDB-MIF have joined forces with the Ministry of Tourism and together have provided $6.3 million to expand the program to 10 additional cities including Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Iguaçu Falls, and Porto Alegre, and continue the existing program in Salvador. The national expansion benefited more than 4,000 students from low-income families between 2006 and 2008. 
 
Graduates of the At-Risk Youth Program are placed in mentorships in the private sector, guided by employees for hands-on work experience. By combining these tangible skills with practical knowledge, the Tourism and Social Responsibility Project not only provides a disadvantaged group with desirable job skills, but also aids the hospitality industry in meeting demands of the ever-increasing Brazilian tourism economy. 
 
The Tourism and Social Responsibility program simultaneously prepared the labor force and raised from poverty many young people with immeasurable potential, but little opportunity or access to job training and viable jobs. This tool proved a successful method to solve some of Brazil's economic expansion growing pains.

The Juruena Project: Amazonian Biodiversity Conservation

The Juruena Biodiversity Conservation and Agroforestry Project was a seven-year, $6.7 million Global Environment Facility-supported project in northwest Mato Grosso, Brazil. The project consolidated an integrated matrix of different land uses consisting of contiguous blocks of intact primary forest cover on private lands, corridors of secondary regeneration and more intensive agricultural systems and permanent forest management.
 
With the Ministry and other NGOs, Pro-Natura, one of Brazil's leading environmental NGOs, promoted Amazon organic and natural products in the European Community with support from Pro-Natura's sister organization, Pro-Natura International, in Paris. Pro-Natura was founded in 1986; for more than 18 years Pro-Natura has been implementing creative multi-stakeholder natural resource management programs in Brazil.
 
In seven years, the Juruena Project expanded from 1000 hectares in two municipalities to 1 million hectares in seven municipalities with over 50 public and private sector partners including the United Nations and World Bank. The project served as an important model in the region to demonstrate the benefits of an integrated approach to biodiversity conservation and agroforestry, while also developing the techniques and methodologies required to apply these practices to large-scale areas throughout the Amazon basin.

Agroforestry Program
Counterpart's Analog Forestry system is a community-based agroforestry and sustainable livelihood methodology that integrates the production of food, fuelwood, timber and other natural products while preserving and enhancing the forest canopy and biodiversity of tropical forest ecosystems. 
 
The goals of this component of the project were to create alternatives to destructive "slash and burn" agriculture, conserve biodiversity and increase income generating opportunities for local communities while restoring degraded forest ecosystems. Income generating activities focused on the use of Analog Forestry methods to produce high-value certified non-timber forest products (NTFPs) including: Organic and Fair Trade coffee, cacao, spices, fruits, vegetables and ornamental plants.
 
The Analog Forestry program also integrated micro-, small- and medium sized enterprise access to credit and financial services and helped local producers gain access to major US and international buyers of certified NTFP specialty crops including: Starbucks Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, Tazo Teas, McCormick Spices, Carrefour, Costco, General Mills, SYSCO and Unilever among others.

Photo: © USAID.