Americas Quarterly

the implementation of the program, and students will be tested again at the end of the school year to measure the program’s success.

Some private-sector initiatives are built to take advantage of corporations’ core competency. This is particularly true of TV Globo in Brazil and the Backus/AME project, both of which use modern telecommunications to convey messages and materials. With an audience of nearly seven of every 10 television viewers daily, TV Globo helps educate a large number of children and adults throughout Brazil by dedicating approximately

390 hours per year to educational programming. Ac-
cording to Flavio Carvalho de Oliveira, director of so-
cial projects at TV Globo, “media can play a huge role
in bridging the gap between the rich and the poor, es-
pecially through education.”
In Peru, the Escuela Virtual Backus, jointly managed
by Peruvian brewery Backus (see sidebar), Fundación Cis-
neros (a Venezuela-based NGO dedicated to improving
education and fostering cultural awareness throughout
Latin America) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica
del Perú, uses Internet technology to transmit mate-