When you think about Brazil you might instantly think about the Brazilian carnival, young beautiful women and people who always have a smile on their face and ready to party. What some people don’t know is that Brazil is also a country that has high levels of poverty and inequality. On the very first page of the national census, the population is asked whether they use a hole in the ground or an open cesspit for a toilet. You see, Brazil is a country full of surprises. It’s also the first country in the world to hold a fully digital national census. Yep, you’ve read it right, Brazil will be the first country to hold the digital census, ahead of countries like the US which have reverted to an old-fashioned pen and paper based census after holding digital trials which failed.
This achievement of Brazil also goes to show that developing and emerging countries can make better use of technology to address the challenges they face. The Brazilian Institude of Geography and Statistics ordered 150,000 LG 750 GM smartphones which you can easily find in stores for about $280 a piece. Census interviewers will collect responses with the help of the smartphones. All the data recorded will then be sent via GPS to one of 7000 available data collection units.
Brazilians believe that the digital census has many advantages over the old-fashioned pen and paper method. The data is more accurate because with GPS the exact location of a household can be established. GPS data is also cross-referenced with satellite images to ensure that the responses are geo-tagged appropriately. This approach is especially useful when it comes to slums, as those types of areas change quickly. As the number of people living in such areas constantly changes, printed maps get out of date quite quickly. With the help of the new digital technology, mapping is considerably more accurate. As changes appear, the data can be updated which ensures that the coverage is quite comprehensive.
According to IBGE about 5 percent of households are incorrectly located in traditional censuses. In the case of digital data, a significantly smaller percentage of households (0.5 percent) are incorrectly located. Digital data collection is also easier and more reliable than its paper-based counterpart. Hard to reach communities will also be included in the census for the first time, with the help of the new technology.
On top of that, the mapping technology allows more detailed information on the spatial distribution of public resources (schools, health care centers etc) , according to Parminder Bahra. The new census also proves to be cheaper and more environmentally friendly, with the need for paper being greatly reduced. The cost of all this? $909 million. How much does the US estimate it will spend for a population that’s just one third greater than Brazil’s? $14 billion. According to tech experts, the US failed to adopt a digital census because Harris Corporation, the organization that was hired for the job was aiming to develop a hardware device for collecting the data. Of course, building a specific type of device for this would take a long time to develop, would cost a lot of money to create and would possibly require special facilities to produce. In Brazil, people simply made use of devices already available on the market. Brazil only developed specialty software and applications for PCs and smartphones. This obviously proved to be cheaper, faster and more efficient.
