Drone Mapping For Impoverished Communities

Photo credit: Techo

In Latin America, with economic inequality on the rise, more and more families are driven into poverty. According to a report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 84 million Latin Americans live on or below the poverty line, with a staggering 63 million living in conditions characterized as “extreme poverty,” the highest that number has been in over a decade. One of the most serious consequences of these levels of poverty is the inability to access decent housing: in fact, according to UN-Habitat, as recently as 2014, almost 105 million people lived in slums in Latin America and the Caribbean region.

While governments scramble to provide sufficient aid and properly gauge how to help these impoverished communities, one nonprofit turned to DroneDeploy's philanthropic branch, DroneDeploy.org, to accurately address how to help. Techo, a nonprofit organization geared at tackling extreme poverty, provides youth volunteer services across all of Latin America, including 20 communities in São Paulo, Brazil alone. “What DroneDeploy helps us do is provide visibility to the urban poor that live in these settlements,” says Vitor Pessoa Colombo, Mapping Coordinator for Techo in São Paulo. “Together, we can bring focus to those who previously had little or no visibility.”

Facing The Challenge

People living in these “informal” human settlements usually have limited or no access to adequate housing, education, clean water, sanitation, or other basic services. As a result, they are regularly exposed to cold, rain, dirt, and pollution, which can lead to a variety of health problems. These damaging effects make it considerably harder to escape poverty, as daily life and working capacity are deeply impacted by such conditions.

Municipalities work to curb these effects, but, many times, their efforts fall short. This can be attributed in large part to inaccurate land assessments and a gross underestimation of census numbers. Techo, however, found by using DroneDeploy they could not only better assess the number of families living in impoverished settlements, but could adequately map and pinpoint the risk areas associated with these settlements.

Finding Solutions

Across all Latin American countries, Brazil is the most unequal in terms of income distribution. Within the last year, 2 million more Brazilians slipped into extreme poverty, raising the total number to over 15 million people. Such income inequality is reflected spatially by the configurations of the urban form: auto-constructed human settlements, resulting from extra-legal processes of land occupation, often lacking basic public services, are ubiquitous in the fringes of Brazilian cities, highlighting the social divide that plagues the country.

In the metropolitan area of São Paulo, where the pilot project between DroneDeploy and Techo is taking place, these human settlements (so-called “favelas”) were home to over 2 million people in 2010, according to the last census conducted by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Techo seeks to build a fair, integrated, and poverty-free society by constructing transitional housing in impoverished areas while implementing a number of social inclusion programs. This housing and community development is the means by which they seek to fulfill their mission: to build a fair, integrated and poverty-free society. The nonprofit targets families who lack a proper home and have no access to basic services, such as clean water, electricity, and sewerage. In order to provide services to these communities, though, Techo needs to know how many people are living across these settlements. This can be quite challenging, as census datasets are frequently underestimated and, in some cases, the very existence of these human settlements is ignored or omitted from public records altogether.

Using DroneDeploy, Techo was able to correctly map and count the total number of families, providing the basic information needed to start any urban upgrading project. In one São Paulo community, for example, the municipality estimated there to be 250 families living in the area. As it turned out, there were actually over 520 families, over double the original assessment.

Using DroneDeploy, Techo can also better identify families living in risk areas. In São Paulo, for instance, many homes in low-income settlements are at risk due to flooding or land erosion. These risks, though, aren’t always quantifiable without the use of drone technology. “The quality of the images that we got from DroneDeploy not only allowed us to count the number of shacks in these communities, but it allowed us to map the perimeter of these shacks and to give them relatively precise geographic coordinates," Colombo said.

Techo uses DroneDeploy to create orthomosaics composed of aerial photos of the informal communities. From there, Techo can bring the data into a geographic information system (GIS) and create boundaries around individual homes. By working with high-resolution raster and vector data - rather than in estimates - Techo’s mapping team in São Paulo can accurately measure which shacks were at higher risk to flood or erosion. In May 2019, a mapping campaign in a community located in the eastern part of the city identified 118 families living in areas exposed to geological risk. From there, Techo could initiate a plan to relocate these families to safer locations by building them quality transitional homes.

A Path to the Future