Rio de Janeiro Manifesto Charter

The territory offers the opportunities. Education prepares people. Technology expands the capacity to deliver. Companies generate economic activity and jobs. And cooperation among sectors turns these forces into sustainable development.

This charter is born from the launch of Workforce Brasil in Rio de Janeiro and proposes a common goal: to raise the potential of territories to transform realities, create opportunities and prepare a new generation of citizens, professionals, companies and public and private organizations.

A smart territory cannot be bought ready-made: it is built with people

Housing, engineering, infrastructure and intelligence turn a place into a smart territory, but what makes it move is entrepreneurship and prepared people.

Why Rio, why October 26

On October 26, 1983, in Brasília, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela signed the Constitutive Act of the Latin American Technological Information Network (RITLA), an intergovernmental body created within the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System (SELA), with its Central Nucleus based in Rio de Janeiro. Among its objectives was to foster the education and training of the people needed for the region's technological development.

It was from RITLA that the International Services Zone (ZIS) was proposed. Exactly 43 years later, Workforce Brasil takes up, in the same Rio de Janeiro, the question that act left open: how to turn knowledge into productive capacity that stays in the territory and in its people.

The question that brings us together

How can we turn the opportunities and challenges of a territory into jobs, vocational training, innovation and new businesses?

Housing, engineering, infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence (AI), applied at scale, from school to the reskilling of those already in the labor market, are among the great challenges and great opportunities of Rio de Janeiro and the Americas. The answer requires a new form of cooperation among those who build, teach, employ, start businesses and shape public policy.

The corridors that connect us

Rio does not need to start from scratch. It has projects, skills, institutions and a position that places it at the crossroads of three axes:

• The Miami-Rio de Janeiro Corridor, the first binational node of the ZIS, which connects skills, institutions, technologies and investment to turn knowledge into productive capacity.
• The Corridor of the Americas, coordinated with the Organization of American States (OAS), which carries the same agenda from north to south across the hemisphere.
• The Bioceanic Corridor, which opens the connection from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with the Copacabana Fort pilot project as the starting point of this agenda in Rio.

In all of them, preparing people is the common link: a corridor that only moves cargo and capital, without preparing people, passes through the territory without staying in it.

What we stand for

Housing and profession go hand in hand. The country needs to expand access to housing for millions of families and, at the same time, train professionals to build in a more productive, technological and sustainable way. Housing policy and industrialized construction must be treated as a single agenda of housing, productivity, vocational training and job creation.

Digital engineering needs well-prepared people. Software is advancing fast. The challenge is to prepare technicians, engineers and managers to use Building Information Modeling (BIM), collaborative processes and AI with competence, productivity and responsibility, and to reskill those already working in construction.

Every infrastructure investment should leave two legacies. The first is the project itself: more modern, efficient, safe and sustainable ports, airports, railways, highways and logistics systems. The second is people: professionals able to design, build, integrate, operate and evolve these systems, and entrepreneurs prepared to create new solutions. This second legacy must be planned from the start of each project.

Training also means training those who start businesses. Vocational training must prepare people to hold jobs and also to create companies. Junior Enterprises, startups and small businesses bring students and young professionals closer to real challenges of public and private organizations.

AI is a matter of education. The question is no longer whether AI will transform work, but how to prepare people to work with it, from school to university, from technical qualification to the reskilling of those already employed, without losing sight of human responsibility.

Skills are built throughout life. None of these agendas can be sustained by training that ends at a single stage. We advocate a continuous path of lifelong learning: a foundation in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) from school onward; vocational and technological education; the upgrading of those already at work (upskilling); and the requalification of those changing occupations (reskilling). Technical, digital, green and socio-emotional skills should be recognized wherever they were acquired, including on the job, and certified so that people can carry them from one job to the next. And the quality of this training should be compared against international benchmarks, such as PISA-VET, the international assessment of vocational education and training (VET) that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is implementing.

The territory must be read with method. Information describing a territory must be produced by a tested, traceable and replicable scientific method, combining official data with what people live. Without it, an investment's priority is only the opinion of whoever speaks loudest. This reading is the starting point of every Workforce Brasil stop.

The cycle we want to set in motion

• 1. A well-structured territory attracts talent and entrepreneurs.
• 2. Entrepreneurs create solutions to local problems.
• 3. Solutions that grow create skilled jobs and tax revenue.
• 4. Jobs and revenue fund the next round of housing, engineering, infrastructure and intelligence.
• 5. None of this turns without prepared people at every stage. That is the link Workforce Brasil takes on.

Brazil and Rio already have tools to start this cycle: open territorial data, such as DATA.RIO from Rio City Hall; the regulatory sandbox and the Public Contract for Innovative Solutions, created by the Startups Legal Framework (Complementary Law No. 182/2021); and the possibility of turning a neighborhood or a network into a living lab, by agreement with whoever manages it.

What we propose

A practical cooperation agenda, from Rio de Janeiro to the Americas, that connects:

• Territory: priority challenges and opportunities, identified with method.
• Education: a STEAM foundation from school onward, initial training, technical training, upskilling and reskilling throughout life, with recognition and certification of skills.
• Technology: AI and digital tools applied at scale.
• Employment: training aligned with the needs of companies and of new professions.
• Business: projects, partnerships and investment opportunities.
• Public policy: cooperation among governments, universities, companies and civil society organizations.

We also propose a method: gather the sectors' contributions and make clear where there is consensus, where there are disagreements and what depends on a decision. The purpose is not to eliminate disagreements, but to turn them into clear questions, with alternatives and next steps, leading to pilot projects with targets, owners and indicators.

What signatories commit to

Each institution that signs this charter commits to:

• 1. Appoint a person responsible for following up on the agenda.
• 2. Bring at least one project, one dataset, one real challenge or one skills gap from its field to the Workforce Brasil working table.
• 3. Report on progress at the next stop: what was done, who did it and what is still missing.

Our call

We invite governments, universities and research centers, companies and industry associations, financial institutions, schools, professionals, young entrepreneurs, small businesses and data and AI specialists to answer a simple question together:

Which projects can we set in motion, with which partners, which resources and which targets, to show that integrating territory, technology and people delivers measurable results?

From the Copacabana Fort to Miami, and from the corridors of the Americas to the Pacific, we propose a glocal agenda in which housing, engineering, infrastructure, education, entrepreneurship and AI act as complementary forces.