Armed with little more than a DevInfo database, a weighing scale and a generous dose of civic passion, Gilson Trindade was able to dramatically boost public funding for low-income families in his city.
The national launch in 2008 of the Portal ODM database by ORBIS, a Brazilian NGO based in the southern state of Paraná, was truly a gift to the country’s 5,565 municipalities. Adapted from the DevInfo database system, Portal ODM tracks municipal-level data on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For the first time in history, the Brazilian public was given free online |
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Gilson Trindade, city councilman, Camapuã
(Mato Grosso do Sul state) |
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access (www.portalodm.org.br/devinfo) to human development data on their own cities. Not surprisingly, the site became an instant hit: since its launch, there have been over 350,000 site visits.
Most importantly, Portal ODM has been used time and again by local citizenry to bring previously unavailable evidence to the decision-making table, with wonderfully positive results. After Gilson Trindade, a city councilman in Camapuã (Mato Grosso do Sul state) was introduced to Portal ODM, he browsed for data on his own city and made a note of the existing problems. Armed with solid data, he then contacted the various municipal departments to inquire what, if anything, they were doing to address these problems.
In the course of his inquiry, he discovered to his amazement that some of the municipal departments had no idea what the Decentralized Management Index (DMI) was all about. The DMI is one of the key composite indicators used by the Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance) program, a government welfare initiative that provides financial assistance to poor families. The DMI is intended to measure the level of state and municipal commitment to the Bolsa Familia program objectives. The higher a municipality’s DMI, the more funding it qualifies to receive from the federal Ministry of Social Development.
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One of the indicators comprising the DMI is the percentage of children weighed. Trindade learned through Portal ODM that in his city of Camapuã, only 17 percent of children were actually being weighed. Using his platform as a city councilman, Trindade quickly succeeded in getting over 70 percent of the children weighed, thereby raising the value of the composite DMI. As a direct result of his actions, his city qualified to receive an additional USD 2,000 per month of public funding for social programs!
Affirms Trindade, “DevInfo is a powerful social management instrument, because it efficiently compiles previously hard-to-access indicators in one place. Thus, goals and guidelines can be followed, because we can’t tackle municipal problems based simply on improvisation and hypothetical data.”
Trindade’s experience with DevInfo is not unique. Portal ODM is increasingly being used and cited in local development plans. Data and presentation objects derived from the database have been widely disseminated in the mainstream media. The database has been officially presented to all 27 Brazilian states in local MDG workshops. And a growing number of Brazilian municipalities are |
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A boy being weighed in the city of Camapuã |
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requesting training to be able to use the database system to monitor development progress at the local level.
“DevInfo combats disorganization and lack of planning,” avows Trindade. “Wherever I go, I usually share that DevInfo is the world’s most powerful and modern free public management tool available!”
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| Data making a difference. |
For more information, please contact Angelo Tadini, Project Analyst, ORBIS, at
angelo.tadini@sesipr.org.br.
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