Petrobras Development & Citizenship Program

The Petrobras Development & Citizenship Program brings together the company’s principal investments in social projects in Brazil. Designed to have a long-term vision, the program is aligned with the company’s Social Responsibility Policy and has the same time horizon as the Petrobras Business Plan. The program invests in social projects that contribute to promoting development with equal opportunities and harnessing local potential.

With a total investment of R$1.3 billion by 2012, the Petrobras Development & Citizenship Program possesses a set of performance indicators and goals that enable integrated monitoring and evaluation of the results of the social projects supported throughout the country. The projects fall into three categories: generating income and job opportunities; education and professional training; and guaranteeing the rights of children and teenagers.

The program holds an annual public tender to select social projects, thereby ensuring both transparency and democratic access to its steadily increasing sponsorship resources. Every year, a request for proposals document is issued, inviting social organizations from throughout Brazil to propose projects to tackle poverty in the country in partnership with Petrobras. The submitted proposals are analyzed by in-house and external evaluators.

Requests for sponsorship are welcomed from NGOs, government entities, community organizations, universities, and other institutions in all states of Brazil.

Proposals involving the Rede de Tecnologia Social (Social Technology Network) organization are prioritized. Preference is also given to projects developed through interaction with the community, featuring replicable methodologies and effective solutions for social transformation that could be adopted as public policies.

By means of a widely publicized and transparent process, submitted proposals are sorted, administratively and then technically, before being evaluated by a committee composed of Petrobras workers and renowned professionals from the third sector, the media, and academia.

Over the course of 2009, Petrobras worked to implement a Systematic Study of Social Investments, incorporating the analysis, selection, approval, monitoring, and evaluation of all social projects supported in the country. As part of this, around 350 Petrobras technicians and 498 social organizations from all Brazilian states received training at the Petrobras University in Rio de Janeiro.

The Petrobras Development & Citizenship Program has a strategic, transformational philosophy that entails not only transferring financial resources, but also strengthening autonomy, organization, and work integration with the co-participation of the community. Continuous monitoring and evaluation results in improvements to the projects’ management, processes, and methodologies, as well as the systemization of social technologies that can be shared to strengthen public policies.

One initiative that warrants highlighting in the “generating income and job opportunities” category is the “Arassussa: Sustainable Araçuaí” project. Developed in Vale do Jequitinhonha, a rural region, the project tests different social technologies in a convergent manner with the aim of building sustainable cities. The project works simultaneously with a wide range of initiatives including bioconstruction, permaculture, rainfall collection, medicinal plant gardens, hydroponics, the establishment of cooperative, sustainable craft workshops, energy production, and carbon capture.

Petrobras is also carrying out a project in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to guarantee the rights of children and teenagers in the semiarid region of Brazil, an area known for its extreme poverty. Through the UNICEF “Approved Municipality” certification project, communities and public officials are being trained and invited to contribute to promote better living conditions for young people in the region.

In the last edition of the project, approximately 1,130 municipalities from 11 states in the semiarid region applied for the UNICEF approval, and of these, 262 obtained certification. One of the results is that the rate of child malnutrition among children under the age of two has halved, which means that around 291,000 infants were spared malnutrition. Access to prenatal care has risen 21.2 percent and disparities between age and school grade have diminished 63 percent.

Petrobras is also a partner of the Portela, Salgueiro, Vila Isabel, Beija Flor, and Rocinha samba schools in building “Olympic Village” sports centers and providing youth training for the carnival industry. These projects create job opportunities not just in the hangars where the samba schools make their floats and costumes, but in related industries such as fashion, the arts, entertainment, beauty, children’s parties, jewelry, and crafts, throughout the whole year.

Around 6,470 young people from poor communities in Rio de Janeiro and Nilópolis have already participated in courses in carnival costumes, information technology, and citizenship, as well as sports activities in the Olympic Villages. Of these, 694 worked on the 2009 carnival. A further 30 former participants set up a cooperative hired by Salgueiro samba school to make a portion of their costumes for the 2010 carnival.