In the Dreams favela, in the Brazilian city of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, Crislaine Fernandes da Silva strolls to work for her morning conference call. She works out of a shipping container that’s been repurposed into a logistics center for naPorta, a startup that provides last-mile delivery services for ecommerce companies, letting them access hard-to-reach places like the middle of the sprawling, low-income communities on the outskirts of Brazil’s major cities. Da Silva takes in the packages, sorts them, then dispatches them via local couriers to customers.
It’s a far cry from her last job as a cleaner earning 600 Brazilian reais ($124) a month—half the national minimum wage—for a 12-hour day, leaving the house before dawn and walking the unpaved streets by an open sewer. The work was often dehumanizing. “In roles like cleaning, you are assigned a post, and then you are forgotten,” she says. “I’ve always wanted better things for myself but didn’t know how to get there. Now, I learn new things daily and finally feel like I am a part of something.”
Da Silva’s trajectory illustrates the paradox of favelas, which grapple with challenges ranging from a lack of essential infrastructure and environmental risks to rampant unemployment. On the one hand, these communities are a testament to the failure of the state to provide basic services and formulate economic policies to lift millions of people out of a state of extreme vulnerability. On the other hand, they are centers of economic activity: According to a study carried out by research firm Data Favela, revenue generated in shantytowns exceeded 200 billion Brazilian reais ($41.5 billion) in 2022, up 8.6 percent on the prior year.
But connecting the need with the opportunity has often been difficult. Da Silva got her role at naPorta thanks to an initiative by the nonprofit organization Gerando Falcões, called Favela 3D, which is trying to use technology to open up markets and create opportunities for people within the favelas.
Favela 3D—the three Ds stand for dignify, digitize, and develop—was created by Edu Lyra, a social entrepreneur who grew up in poverty in Guarulhos, a city near to São Paulo. Lyra recalls sleeping on dirt floors next to rats, surviving flooding, and visiting his father in jail. Inspired by his mother’s conviction that “it’s not where you come from but where you’re going that counts,” Lyra wrote a book about youth-led transformative initiatives and used the proceeds to establish Gerando Falcões in 2013. Created two years ago, Favela 3D is Gerando Falcões’ flagship project.
Lyra says his approach is based on the radical idea that favelados (favela residents) should get a say in what they need, rather than being prescribed solutions from above. “We can ensure dignity to millions of favelados who don’t want handouts for their entire lives,” he says. “Citizens must be at the center of decisionmaking.”
Government projects aimed at tackling poverty in Brazil don’t typically involve low-income communities, a fact acknowledged by the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, at an event in the Dreams favela in July. “We don’t know how to solve [the issues faced by favelas] nor have any idea of where to start”, de Freitas said. “The relationship between the state [and citizens] has to change to improve the lives of people in favelas and the homeless. The state doesn’t know how to listen.”
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