With the Young Apprentice Program, Emater trains young people for their professional future
The Technical Assistance and Rural Extension Company of the State of Pará (Emater) promotes guidance and training courses for labor activities
Sixteen adolescents and young adults, aged between 15 and 20 years, in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability and residing in the outskirts of the Metropolitan Region of Belém (RMB), are getting an inside look at a strategic public service of the Government of Pará: the official technical assistance and rural extension, conducted for almost 60 years by the Technical Assistance and Rural Extension Company of the State of Pará (Emater) in all 144 municipalities of Pará.
Based at the central office of the agency in Marituba, the group is part of the current institutional program Young Apprentice: for 16 months, they experience the administrative routine of a general structure that currently comprises 144 local offices in all municipalities; 12 regional offices in the hub municipalities, and two training and research units - in Bragança, on the Rio Caeté, and in Conceição do Araguaia, in the southeast.
Some of the participants were referred through a partnership with the Municipal Department of Social Assistance and Citizenship (Semasc) of Marituba, as a development of the inclusion project Young Sunflower, from the municipal government.
“The goal is to provide real learning and work experiences for future professionals who are still choosing their paths. The Program is also a bridge with the community neighboring Emater's headquarters here in Marituba: we create dialogue about our presence, about our actions, about the results useful to society,” explains psychologist Rosângela Barros, in the Human Resources Center (NRH), the department responsible for the Young Apprentice Program.
This Wednesday (10), the young apprentices completed another internal training. This time, a mini-course on Basic Statistics Applied to Emater's Reality, taught by statistician Wilson Peniche, from the Studies and Evaluation Center (Nea). There were a total of 20 hours of in-person classes, divided into two sessions per week, in the meeting room of Emater's central office.
“It is a course that does not require prior knowledge and through which we introduce the basic concepts of descriptive statistics, in accessible and contextualized language. The technical-pedagogical approach is of 'active learning'. We use real examples or create simulations, focusing on environmental and agricultural indicators, and guide the practical part with analyses, spreadsheets, and graphs,” points out the instructor.
Paulo Mateus Cardoso, 20 years old, a resident of the Almir Gabriel neighborhood in Marituba, believes that acquiring information in Emater's dynamics can help him define the course for which he will take the entrance exam: “I am still in doubt, I have nothing certain, but here at Emater I am in the Accounting sector [Secon] and this excites me a lot, because I really identified with it; if I had to choose a course today, I would choose Accounting Sciences,” he said.
Izabelly Souza, 18 years old, a resident of the Novo neighborhood in Marituba, is already in her second semester of college studying Physical Education and is currently developing tasks in the Legal Advisory (Ajur). “I think being a young apprentice of the Government of Pará enhances my collection, my repertoire, and my ideas and adds a lot of scientific, practical novelty. I do not have access to a computer at home and here I am working with spreadsheets, with data,” she reports.
Text by Aline Miranda
