The Cities Coalition for Digital Rights (CC4DR) is pleased to welcome Belo Horizonte as a new member. With a population of more than two million inhabitants, the city is the capital and largest city of the Southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

To highlight the city’s achievements and ongoing work in the field of digital human rights, we had the pleasure of talking to Jean Mattos Duarte, CEO of the City's Technology and Information Company (PRODABEL). 

The municipal support officers from the Technology and Information Company (PRODABEL) are in direct contact with the residents of Belo Horizonte.

Thanks to its strong tradition of joining city networks, the municipality of Belo Horizonte is very well connected with other cities: At the national level in Brazil, the city is part of ANCITI (the National Association of Smart, technological and innovative cities) and the Forum Inovacidades (a think tank created by cities exchanging on innovation) supported by the Brazilian Mayors’ Association, which serve as platforms to exchange solutions and policies related to digital inclusion. Internationally, the city also collaborates with various international partners, including the U.S. and U.K. embassies, to implement digital inclusion programmes.

Therefore, when the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights approached Belo Horizonte, the city did not hesitate and immediately recognized the opportunity in “the power of global networks”, as Jean Mattos Duarte said, “to exchange on what we are doing here, to learn from other cities, and to contribute to the international debate on digital inclusion”.

A culture of citizen-centric and transparent public service design

This commitment to face social inequalities regarding digital access and literacy is aligned with the broader modernisation strategy in Belo Horizonte: A key priority for the city is to bring public services closer to the citizens. To this end, the municipality has been working for several years to develop a smart city programme, implementing more than 90 projects covering the five axes of digital transformation, digital governance, citizen relationship, digital culture, and digital inclusion.  

This smart city programme is accompanied by a city-wide digitalisation of public services, adopting an approach that aims to improve administrative efficiency, promote citizen participation and ensure the inclusion of all citizens in their access to public services. From 1,400 public services that the city hall offers, 1,000 of them are fully digital. From the very beginning, the design of digital services in Belo Horizonte is meant to bring public administration closer to the citizens, in order to install a “culture of citizen-centric public service design”, in the words of Jean Mattos Duarte. In practice, this culture is implemented through a feedback process that allows citizens to evaluate digital services. Furthermore, platforms such as the Open Data Portal and the Transparency Portal facilitate public access to data about the city.

A comprehensive Digital Inclusion Programme taking into account different levels of vulnerability

The city of Belo Horizonte is aware that digital transformation can exacerbate existing inequalities, or as Jean Mattos Duarte puts it, when digital transformation comes like a wave, some people will be able to surf on it better than others: surveys show that despite a recent increase in Brazilian households having access to the internet, more than 20 million Brazilians (the equivalent of 10 percent of the population) still lack access to technology. The pandemic brought a further important shift in citizens’ behaviour, as the social distancing rules saw many public services go online, which raised the number of citizens exposed to digital exclusion.

To address these difficulties, Belo Horizonte has developed a comprehensive Digital Inclusion Programme to deliver connectivity, devices and digital literacy to the population. The programme has increased the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots to 4,000, with half of them set up in areas of economic vulnerability and high risk of digital exclusion, giving public Internet access to almost 400,000 people in around 15-20 percent of the city surface. Access to devices is ensured by donating computers to people with social difficulties, making refurbished computers available to residents who are part of social programmes or who live in informal settlements. This way, the city was able to provide households with around 2,000 computers, notebooks and tablets in the last two years.

Young people are learning the basics of information technology in public internet spaces throughout the city of Belo Horizonte.

The roll-out of accessible internet is accompanied by the creation of public Internet spaces, called telecentros in Brazilian Portuguese. Around 150 of those spaces are now available in Belo Horizonte throughout the City Hall’s structures such as social assistance offices; and also institutions like NGOs that have partnerships with the City Hall.

Raising awareness on digital human rights by developing digital skills

Another challenge that the city faces is that social vulnerabilities can also create a heightened need for digital skills. The awareness about digital rights is a major factor in this regard: as Jean Mattos Duarte states, citizens’ complaints about data protection issues directed at the city hall can sometimes be at odds with their tolerance of personal data use by private Big Tech companies. Belo Horizonte is actively working on fighting the digital divide in the city by deploying a number of various initiatives such as offering educational courses: the city hall proposes free online classes ranging from basic technological introduction to computers, all the way to programming or developing a Web page. These courses allowed Belo Horizonte to certify around 15,000 participants with competences in digital skills.

Here too, Jean Mattos Duarte highlights the importance of recognizing digital inequalities and leaving no one behind. His approach is to tailor the solutions towards the specific needs of different vulnerable groups. One important example is the digital inclusion initiatives for women: In 2018, the city introduced “Coding her dreams”, a course teaching programming skills specifically to women. The objective is to fight internalised stereotypes that technology is reserved to men, and to lower barriers to participation for women in courses where, until recently, the majority were masculine participants. Since then, the initiative has successfully increased the number of women in the courses to 60 percent of certified participants. This active approach towards specific groups is also reflected in the city’s technology introduction courses for elderly people, and classes teaching the basics of computational skills to young people in schools. 

Graduates of a municipal digital technology introduction course for elder residents are presenting their certificates

Breaking barriers by making use of the ecosystem of organisations beyond the public sector

To achieve this synergy of citizen-centred public service design and digital inclusion, the city hall is also engaging in partnerships with other organisations: Belo Horizonte has been working with NGOs to offer support to women experiencing domestic violence through workshops, or specialised professionals initiating hearing-impaired residents to accessible technology with sign-language. The municipality is also reaching out to the private sector in order to provide the city population with digital skills, and encourage citizen-led tech entrepreneurship.

In short, Belo Horizonte is set to face the numerous opportunities and challenges brought about by the digital transformation by staying true to the overarching philosophy inspiring its digitalisation strategy from the very start: bringing digital public services closer to people’s needs. Looking towards the future, Jean Mattos Duarte emphasises the impact of emerging technologies, notably AI, on public service delivery and decision-making, which equally entail digital rights issues.