This program is providing addresses for people living in Brazil’s unmapped favelas

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Many of us take street addresses for granted. We use our addresses to order food and other goods, and to secure access to water and utilities. But more than 15 million Brazilians are not so fortunate. Living in the improvised housing complexes of densely populated favelas, many low-income residents lack a traditional address and can’t access even the most basic modern services.



The Brazilian e-commerce company Americanas joined forces with the NGO G10 Favelas and the startup Favela Brasil to address the problem through a partnership with Google, leveraging the tech giant’s existing Open Location Code technology to provide a coded and searchable address for every location in the world. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award in the Latin America category.



[Photo: Americanas]



Launched in January 2022, Plus Codes Brazil creates a digital address, allowing GPS to identify the exact location by latitude and longitude. These addresses, accurate to within 1 meter, can be used by favela residents not only for e-commerce deliveries (the addresses become visible in Google Maps and Waze), but also to register at health centers or access vital services, such as water or electricity.



Favela Brasil Xpress then works with Google to map the area, and Google produces signs that include address coordinates that can be attached to buildings. Since many people living in favelas don’t use cars or trucks, the maps include roads used by bicycles and “tuk-tuks” (a type of electric three-wheeled open vehicle).More than 1,700 addresses have been mapped so far in the Paraisópolis favela, facilitating as many as 5,000 deliveries a day.