[📢 This is the first of a series of publications on Mapeo projects around the world! If you and your community are using Mapeo and want to get in touch, please do - we would love to hear from you! Also, let us know if you want us to feature your project with a blog post, an interview, a video, or any other form. We would be thrilled to share your story.]
The Fundação Escola Bosque (FUNBOSQUE) is a public municipal organization that works in the area of environmental education in the Amazon River estuary region. Since 2021, FUNBOSQUE is using Mapeo in the insular region of Belém with community members, students, teachers, and researchers to learn how to collect, organize and process their data, to generate the necessary knowledge for decision-making in order to transform the reality of their territory.
Watch the following short video with FUNBOSQUE’s Professor Dr. Jader Gama to know more about it:
You can watch the video in Portuguese with either English or Spanish subtitles, or you can read the transcripted interview below:
“I am a professor at Fundação Escola Bosque. The Fundação Escola Bosque is a public municipal organization that works in the area of environmental education in the Amazon River estuary region, so it is in the Amazon Delta, where the Amazon River flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
We operate in seven units, on five islands, and we are doing data literacy work with our students and the entire island community. And for us to do this data literacy work we are working with a tool that is a free software developed by Digital Democracy called Mapeo.
Mapeo is being very important in this process of doing this technical disalienation about data with people who live in the region of the insular region of Belém, and that opens the possibility for community members, students, teachers, and researchers to learn how to collect their data, to organize this data, to store it, process it, and through the organization of information to generate the knowledge that is necessary for decision making in order to transform the reality of the territory for the better.
So at this moment, we are mapping the wells, for example, from where people drink water, we are relating this to health data, and from the analysis of this data we realize which water is contaminated water, and this way we are now working on the construction of biological filters created from activated charcoal made from açaí seeds after removing its pulp.
So the data are of fundamental importance for citizenship to be fully established. And I thank the people at Digital Democracy for collaborating in this process. Luandro has actively participated in this process here in the Foz do Rio Amazonas region.
And the trend now is that we expand this process, that we can multiply it so that more people can collect data in the territory and use this data in their favor.
Big hug that's it, thank you.”
Professor Dr. Jader Gama, FUNBOSQUE
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To know more about FUNBOSQUE, visit their Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/Funbosque
Or the foundation's official website https://funbosque.belem.pa.gov.br/
And if you want to contact them directly, you can write Professor Dr. Jader Gama at jader.gama@funbosque.pmb.pa.gov.br or jadergama@ufpa.br
Twitter: @ogama