The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) held this Tuesday (5) the workshop “12th Census of Agriculture, Forestry and Aquaculture: Communication, Mobilization and Information Quality”. The activity was aimed at preparing communicators for the coverage and dissemination of the information collected by the survey.

The workshop was conducted by specialists from the Institute's technical team, at Casa Brasil IBGE, in Rio de Janeiro, and broadcast live online.

The opening of the event featured the General Coordinator of the IBGE's Center of Information Documentation and Dissemination Center, José Daniel Castro da Silva, who spoke about the importance of the workshop. “All of us Brazilians are under the impact of the Census in some way, both the Population Census and the Census of  Agriculture. As a communication professional, I used to follow attentively what the IBGE did as a data producer.”

The workshop addressed communication strategies and tools used by the Institute, as well as the experience of accessing, navigating and understanding the data available on IBGE's digital platforms.

The Director of Surveys, Gustavo Junger da Silva, highlighted the complexity of the work. “Census operations are the most complex operations ever carried out by a national statistical institute in the field, due to the large mobilization of people, the need to manage budgetary resources, and highly complex logistics, especially when it comes to such an immense country like Brazil.” Mr. Silva also emphasized the importance of disseminating IBGE information. “In the midst of the communication era, with the speed of the digital age, any investment in communicating well what is intended, what the objectives are, what society will gain from carrying out a census operation can be determinant for the actual field conditions to be faced next year.”

The Coordinator of Agricultural Statistics, Vando da Paz Nascimento, explained the importance of communicators during the Census work. “In the Population Census and in the Census of Agriculture, we need a much greater communication effort than in all the other surveys we conduct regularly, because we will, in fact, cover the entire territory and producers must be reached. We need to talk to these producers. They are not used to receiving the IBGE on their routines. So, it is up to the communicators to help the IBGE to pass a clear message to them,” he said. "We need to convey a great deal of assurance about the objective of the operation, making producers feel confident,” he added.

“The IBGE produces a lot of data, a lot of information, but if we cannot communicate them, we won't be able to fulfill our role disseminating information,” pointed out the Social Communication Coordinator, Michel Silva. “Today, we have a huge task, which is to communicate IBGE materials to different audiences that follow the Institute, and often this audience lacks statistical literacy. The people who are on the front lines working with communication in community radios, print newspapers, word of mouth, the general public, generally don't have this kind of knowledge in statistical literacy. So, it's important that we simplify the information dissemination.” he said.

To conclude the event, the Innovation and Development Manager, Rodrigo Rego, presented IBGE's tools and platforms for data visualization and showed, step-by-step, how communicators can access the information produced by the Institute.