Transforming Favelas: How This Group Is Working to End Poverty in Brazil
“We want to send the poverty seen in favelas to the museum before Elon Musk colonizes Mars.”
[Image description: Edu Lyra above a favela in Brazil.]
Edu Lyra wanted to be a journalist. For his final university project, he traveled across Brazil to interview ordinary people who broke the cycle of poverty.
This meant visiting a lot of favelas — the crowded slums that dominate the outskirts and neglected areas of cities across the country.
For Lyra, this was like going home. After all, he grew up in a favela in Guarulhos, a city near São Paulo. When asked about his earliest memories, he describes the time when police surrounded his home, helicopters swarming loudly overhead, looking for his dad who had participated in a bank robbery.
“The police in Brazil, they don’t knock first,” he told Global Citizen, after comparing favelas to a prison. “They kick the door down with shotguns and heavy armor.”
Favelas represent governmental failures and the ongoing repercussions of an economy built on slavery. They hold roughly 6% of the country’s population and reflect the country’s skewed racial hierarchy, where Black people are structurally excluded from opportunities and disproportionately victimized by violence. Despite efforts to address racial inequality in the country, the problem seems to be getting worse. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of families living in favelas nearly doubled, and, since then, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty has only worsened.
Favelas often lack working water and sanitation systems, educational opportunities are limited, and jobs that pay more than poverty wages are few and far between.
“The poverty in the favelas, it’s something that’s like a curse,” Lyra said. “You’re cursed by it. It’s a judicial sentence put upon you for the rest of your life. People go and apply for jobs and if they put a ZIP code or mention where they’re from, their job application gets ripped apart, and the curse is put upon them.”
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the ways in which favelas are like a prison. In slums with little government and public health support, the virus ravaged communities much as it did in crowded, unsanitary prisons. More often than not, the government responds to conditions in the favelas by focusing exclusively on gangs and sending in teams of heavily armed police to conduct violent raids.
So he started Gerando Falcões (“Raising Falcons” in English), a social justice organization dedicated to eliminating poverty in Brazil and unlocking the potential of every person living in a favela. Since it began, the organization has helped to develop dozens of social service providers that benefit more than 200,000 people in around 1,700 favelas. Its model has broad appeal both within favelas and throughout the global community, seeing as it receives funding from a range of companies, social investors, and individuals.
Continue reading.
