Profile of Rodrigo Baggio

Rodrigo Baggio, 37 years old, is a social entrepreneur, founder and executive director of the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology (CDI), a non-governmental, non-profit organization. Since 1995, CDI has developed pioneer work in promoting social inclusion by using information technology as a tool for building active citizenship.

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Baggio was first exposed to computers at the age of 12. During the same period, as president of the youth group of his local Methodist church, he worked during vacations in a child care center in one of the city´s hillside favelas.

In 1993, Baggio, who was then an entrepreneur and information technology teacher in private schools in Rio de Janeiro, envisioned the use of computers as a communication channel among young people belonging to different social groups, who would interact with one another via Internet. This idea originated a BBS (Bulletin Board System) called "Jovemlink" and led to the first step towards the use of information and communication technology as a digital bridge in the promotion of social integration. The idea was to use a BBS to help promote the dialogue among individuals living in "favelas" (slums) and those living in more privileged neighborhoods within the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The service had hundreds of users, but soon there was a concern: almost all of them were young high and middle class people. The challenge, therefore, would be to ensure the underprivileged communities access to the technology. During that time, the campaign Informática para Todos (informatics for all) started a pioneer initiative in Brazil, which aimed at collecting used computers to be donated to underprivileged communities. The campaign received the collaboration of several institutions, like FASE and IBASE.

In July 1994, the impact of the campaign was evaluated. It was verified the computers were already incorporated into the daily lives of the community centers where they were installed, but not used in its full capacity, since the use of technology was not part of the local culture. Hence the idea of the Information Technology and Citizens Rights Schools (ITCRSs), which came with a completely innovative vision: to ally technology and citizen rights promotion, through the students' reflections and debates about the reality of their communities.

Soon after, the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology was founded, a non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental organization, aimed at spreading ITCRS´s to other communities and creating a political-pedagogical proposal to standardize this new educational model, interweaving information technology and citizens rights awareness.

The initial estimate of opening four or five other ITCRS´s was exceeded long before CDI´s first anniversary. With the success of the model, ten schools were soon launched, and in progression they became hundreds of schools and went beyond the Brazilian boundaries. As the committee‚s executive-director, he has consolidated CDI´s model in Brazil and abroad. Today the organization is represented in 9 countries, summing 891 ITCRS´s. As an outcome of the organization´s work, more than 70.000 people were trainned per year. Through our ITCRS´s, created mostly in partnership with community organizations, CDI implements educational programs aiming at the mobilization of excluded sectors of society to transform their reality.

This great network of solidarity makes CDI´s work feasible and replicates its experience. There is an ongoing investment in staff competencies updating, knowledge exchange and the qualification of ITCRS´s‚ educators who come from the communities where the schools are settled. Several prizes and awards prove the international recognition of CDI´s operation and quality of its actions towards social and digital inclusion.

In 1999 Baggio was granted with a scholarship from Ashoka in order to fully devote himself to CDI´s development, which was becoming widely known and respected. Other entities have granted relevant awards and support, such as UN, Unicef, Unesco, World Economic Forum, Time Magazine, CNN, and Banco do Brasil Foundation. Recognized as a Social Entrepreneur, most recently he was granted an Honorary Doctorate from the School of Computer Science at De Paul University in Chicago, Illinois.

• Weblinks
• Biography, Ashoka
• Video, Ashoka Fellows
• Article, "Combating Technological Apartheid in Brasilian Favelas", Changemakers.net