
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.”