Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

About 2 million of Rio de Janeiro’s 6.2 million inhabitants live in favelas, residential areas spread across the City of Rio. These densely populated neighborhoods are often hard to reach, lack infrastructure and many families remain without access to basic services, disconnected from the sewage network, running water or electricity.

The first step to helping these families is to find them, as many of these residents are not part of government systems and there is little data about them. Thus, Rio City Hall decided to launch a new program, Social Territories, in partnership with UN-Habitat, the United Nations’ sustainable urban development program. With field agents who go door to door to interview families, the program’s priorities are to identify families at social risk and provide them with various basic public services, such as school enrollment, health care, referral to social benefits, housing support, and access to professional training and job opportunities. For example, Social Territories data helps the City choose beneficiaries of Casa Carioca, a housing requalification program.

Designed in 2016, Social Territories has proven the value of a three-phase, data-driven approach to helping some of Rio de Janeiro’s most vulnerable residents.

In the first phase, municipal officials conduct interviews with residents to identify how they could help, whether by enrolling children in school, providing clean water or other support. Detailed household survey data is analyzed against standards defined in the UN Multidimensional Poverty Index. Levels of risk are established to indicate the degree of need of each household, which lays the groundwork for the second phase of the program. Using survey and geospatial data, municipal departments reach out to high-risk families, including those living in extreme poverty, to provide appropriate services such as housing, health care, education and job training. The final phase of Social Territories involves monitoring residents receiving targeted services and then reassessing their needs after a year.

In essence, the program aims to proactively learn about disconnected communities and build bridges between the City and residents to improve their lives. Administered by the Pereira Passos Institute, which oversees the City’s data practices and uses detailed demographic data to support the implementation of policies and programs, the Social Territories program has expanded over the years. Originally focused on 10 favelas, in 2022 the program expanded to cover all of Rio de Janeiro. That same year, it was recognized with a World Smart Cities Award.

Today, Social Territories continues to show what can happen when a municipal government prioritizes data-driven decision-making to help its most vulnerable residents. In January 2025,

• Almost 32,000 families identified by the program were served by the Municipal Health Department
• Nearly 26,000 were served by Municipal Secretariat of Social Assistance
• Almost 8,000 families received housing improvements, many of them through Casa Carioca Project
• Nearly 4,000 children were recently enrolled in school

“With the data made available by the Pereira Passos Institute from the field search, we can provide secretariats with information about families, improve the living conditions of the population, improve the efficiency of public management and promote sustainable urban development. It is an immense satisfaction to see the program happen and take shape in Rio.”, says Eduardo Paes, Mayor of Rio de Janeiro.