The Presidente Tancredo Neves Rural Family House (CFR-PTN) was created to offer qualified education and job opportunities to young farmers. The home is a Civil Society Organization of Public Interest (OSCIP) that works through partnerships with the public and private areas. The first of its type installed in Bahia, the teaching unit offers a High School education integrated with technical qualification focused on the rural reality with a duration of three years. Founded in 2002, CFR-PTN already trained 183 youth from the Southern Lowlands region.

Despite the positive results, the Family House team observed that former students still left the rural zones and identified the lack of access to land to be one of the main causes. “When we saw that each youth had, on average, five hectares to produce and this was influencing them to go to the capitals, we thought about helping them,” explained Juscelino Macedo, Leader of the Strategic Manioc and Fruit Production Cooperative Alliance. “This is how the Land Access Fund (FAT) came about,” said Macedo.

FAT works to provide financial assistance to small producers, giving them the conditions to care for their agricultural projects and so that they can live exclusively and fully from the income generated in the field. Seven youth will initially be considered for the initiative.

The proposal is that as members of the Presidente Tancredo Neves Rural Producers’ Cooperative (COOPATAN), the youth take advantage of the partnership with the Brazilian Federal Government bank Banco do Brasil to gain access to an agricultural credit line. “With the incentive, I will apply new technologies to my plantations,” said Jailton Ribeiro, age 22. “I want to serve as an example for other residents by becoming a rural entrepreneur,” he said.