Questions/Answers

The Unified Registry Information Consultation, Selection and Extraction Tool (CECAD) is a system for consulting information from Brazil’s largest social database, the Unified Registry, which gathers data from over 75 million people in social vulnerability across 340 variables. Through CECAD, this database can be accessed at different levels of disaggregation to inform the design and implementation of federal, state and municipal social programs. CECAD unleashed the full potential of the Unified Registry and helped transform it into a multidimensional map of poverty in the country, with data disaggregation allowing the Brazilian state to deliver public policies with a view to leave no one behind. CECAD was developed and launched in 2012 by the Ministry of Social Development (MDS). The tool allows the tabulation of data from each variable, such as income and education. It also allows users to extract the database, in order to build custom charts, and search any Social Identification Number in the Unified Registry. Since then, CECAD has turned out to be the MDS’ most used tool: 7 million views and 5,000 databases extracted per month. All Brazilian states and municipalities access CECAD, as well as social programs managers and other 360 institutions. CECAD has also been continuously updated throughout the years. Some innovations will be released in 2018, such as georeferenced data displayed on maps at municipalities from the variables, automated reporting on municipalities’ socioeconomic data, comparative rankings amongst the cities of the state, and population pyramids that disaggregate the variables by age groups and family composition. At last, it is important to highlight that in order to protect personal data of those in the database, CECAD requires an authorized username and password. Meanwhile, another tool was developed so that anyone can have free access to unidentified data through TABCAD, the Unified Registry Information Tabulator.

The main role of CECAD is to make available data from the Unified Registry in order to meet the specific needs of the social program managers within the three levels of government in Brazil. CECAD is used to identify the target public as well as to design and improve social policies with a view to raise the living standards of the country’s low income and vulnerable families. Overall, these are CECAD´s main goals: A. Enable social policy managers to access the data of individuals and families registered in the Unified Registry through customized reports, with aggregated and individualized information; B. identify the target public and provide subsidies to various social programs that are users of the Unified Registry, such as the Bolsa Família Program, the Social Energy Tariff, Retirement for Housewives, and others; C. assist states and municipalities to plan and implement local public policies based on personalized reports of the Unified Registry data; D. allow other computer systems to have access to the Unified Registry information in order to enhance the interoperability and monitoring of the social protection system in Brazil.

CECAD fits the selected category for the following reasons: A. It has an innovative feature, by supplying social policy managers with information from the Unified Registry in an intuitive and customized way for the formulation, management, monitoring and evaluation of social policies in the three levels of government. CECAD is used to carry out consultations, check benefits, and crosscheck databases. B. It is an affordable solution for any local team in Brazilian municipalities, even those with the most precarious infrastructure: it only requires internet access. CECAD delivers free of charge a massive volume of up-to-date data on the most vulnerable Brazilian families. C. It has motivated partnerships between SAGI/MDS and the following stakeholders: • The National Secretariat for Citizenship Income (SENARC/MDS), responsible for managing the Unified Registry. • The management team of the Unified Social Assistance System, the main social protection system in Brazil. • States and municipalities, which systematically use CECAD and have proposed improvements. • More than twenty programs users of the Unified Registry. D. Its development has promoted transparency and accountability in the delivery of public data, since it provides the Unified Registry data in a well-organized and objective manner. It also encourages the continuous betterment of the Unified Registry database.

The initiative improved public service delivery: by 2012, the Unified Registry data were not accessible to the broad use of Brazilian states and municipalities, and MDS partners. CECAD allowed more than twenty programs that use the Unified Registry to access data in a much more agile and friendly way, leading to the inclusion of thousands of low-income Brazilian families in social programs. To illustrate the innovative use of the tool, we have chosen one of the CECAD's main programs that use the Unified Registry: the Social Energy Tariff, which provides discounts in the energy bills of low-income families. Prior to CECAD, families were expected to request the benefit directly to the electric power company to join the program. Through CECAD, it was possible to increase access to this benefit, in a more organized way. CECAD was responsible for 54% of the beneficiaries included into the Social Energy Tariff in Rio de Janeiro, for example. People like Maria das Dores Bacelar, a housekeeper and resident of the Santa Marta community in Rio de Janeiro. She is a beneficiary of the Social Tariff, and for this reason she usually spends between US$ 2.85 and US$ 4.50 in the energy bill.

The lack of available and up-to-date information to help identify and characterize specific population groups is often the main barrier to accessing public services. CECAD was developed precisely to fill this gap, since it allows the generation of reports based on gender, age and ethnic group. CECAD helps the inclusion of families with different types of vulnerability in social programs of national scope - with objectives as different as, for example, the free public transportation for elderly people or the incentive for traditional peoples to preserve the forest. Other examples include programs in the areas of rural development, environmental conservation, water security, nutrition, education, and social assistance. The relevance of CECAD has turned it into the most accessed MDS tool in five years - 7 million views per month and 5,000 downloaded datasets, on average. It processes information about 75 million people, with monthly updates and more than 340 variables. The users of the tool are in all Brazilian states and municipalities. In addition, 360 other institutions access CECAD periodically.

CECAD generates significant impacts on the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS), which serves families in situations of social vulnerability, with emphasis on the care of children and the elderly. An emblematic case is São José do Rio Preto, a city of about 440,000 inhabitants in the countryside of São Paulo. Since 2013, the municipality has developed an innovative work in the social area targeted at children up to six years old and the elderly (people over 60). CECAD was used by the social assistance surveillance team to extract the database and delivers information in the form of maps. In recent years CECAD’s data have been used in the elaboration of the socio-territorial diagnosis, in the monitoring of the goals of the Municipal Social Assistance Plan and the Management Improvement Pact of SUAS. One concrete result was the use of CECAD’s data to resize the social assistance centers over the territories: two centers changed their address to better match the reality of the public and two teams were created for a more agile service to the households. This territorial reorganization helped the care of families living in vulnerable territories and has made social service more effective for children and the elderly.

CECAD is innovative because it has opened up a wide range of possibilities for the use of the Unified Registry for the formulation, management, monitoring and evaluation of social policies in the three levels of government. Currently, every month the tool receives an average of 7 million accesses and 5,000 datasets are downloaded. CECAD subsidizes the management of more than twenty federal social programs and helps municipal managers to plan local social policies more adapted to the particularities of each region. The information provided is accurate and up-to-date, allowing, for example, the manager to plan adult literacy classes in priority neighborhoods or to issue civil documentation in more remote regions and consider ethnic, gender or age characteristics. The initiative is also innovative in another respect: CECAD was developed by four public servants, using free software, open source tools and common computers - and despite this accounts for more than 60 million queries per year. That is exactly what our time demands from public policies: doing more with less, developing creative solutions that have a positive impact on the lives of the most vulnerable people.

For many years, the management of social policies in Brazil was done in a fragmented manner: several public agencies were producing and using data from various sources to subsidize programs with no coordinated approach among them, and with no account taken of the needs of citizens and the particularities of each locality. Created in 2001, the Unified Registry provides a complete picture of the living conditions of Brazil's most vulnerable citizens. There are multiple ways of using the Unified Registry information, but before CECAD was launched it was not possible to obtain detailed data for social policy managers. Although municipalities had been feeding the system with information from low-income families, the data were not being accessible for more comprehensive use by the states, municipalities and other partner agencies of the MDS. Even a more systematic use by the federal government was being affected by the lack of this mechanism. CECAD is an original solution to boost the use of the Unified Registry information by the three levels of government. It is a strategic tool that allows the visualization of data in different ways: the complete base, personalized reports, or maps with the socio-territorial diagnosis of each Brazilian municipality.

Regarding the development of CECAD, only the resources available in the ministry were used. The project didn't rely on a dedicated budget, but only on the salary of four public servants and the regular equipment and facilities from MDS. Common computers, a free software, and open source tools were used on an expandable platform, which resulted in savings to MDS as well as more accessibility to its users. The development of the tool required an intensive eight-month work to incorporate the activities into the work routine. Apache Lucene is the search engine used to index documents, settled in Java programming language and implemented in TOMCAT. The following programming languages are used for viewing pages: PHP, HTML and Javascript. For data storage, CECAD uses the PostgreSQL database manager system. In addition, CECAD uses the Agile Software Development methodology, with periodic deliveries of functionalities that were evaluated and then adjusted. That methodology allowed great agility in the production and improvement of the developed solution.

Yes

Both the technology and its development model are replicable, ensuring the possibility of transferring it to several other context. Furthermore, CECAD is not demanding in terms of resources, since it was developed in eight months with common computers, a team of four public servants, a free software and an open source tool, in an expandable platform. The Agile Software Development Methodology optimized the further development of the tool. An example of CECAD’s replication is the Consultation, Registration and Programs tool (CCP in the Portuguese acronym), implemented in June 2017 by the Department of Social Assistance and Development of the city of São Paulo - the most populous metropolis in Brazil, with 12 million inhabitants, of which 1.2 million are registered in the Unified Registry. Inspired by CECAD, CCP has two versions. The first is aimed at speeding up the service in the social assistance centers and is in full operation. The second is aimed at meeting demands from local managers of the Unified Registry and the Bolsa Família Program and is in its second phase of development, expected to be implemented in May.

CECAD contributes to managing the Bolsa Família Program and other programs that use the Unified Registry data in a more sustainable way, without the need for the massive use of paper and electronic media (CDs, DVDs). Increasingly, municipalities use the "data extractor" functionality to access the updated and digital Unified Registry database, in which files are presented in a more user-friendly format, without having to request electronic media to be sent by mail. The security of accessing online customized reports at any time also contributes to the agility of the management and decision processes, reducing the need for excessive printed copies which quickly become outdated. In this sense, CECAD encourages social policy managers at all three levels of government to reduce the use of paper in public agencies through electronic data consultation. The use of CECAD by social programs contributes to more agile processes of work, reducing displacements and the red tape. For instance, the policy managers from Rio de Janeiro could be an illustrative case, since they grant the Social Energy Tarriff automatically, without the need for low-income families to come to the electric power company in person. Another example is the fact that social program managers need not resort to bureaucratic procedures in order to access data - they can simply access CECAD whenever necessary.

In six years of operation, CECAD has become a key player in public policy management at the local level: it counts 7 million accesses and 5,000 databases extracted on average per month. The sustainability of CECAD is justified by the agility in providing precise, customized and updated data from the Unified Registry, with the necessary disaggregation at the federal, state and municipality levels. A key factor for CECAD's endurance is the robustness of the Unified Registry - the main instrument of the federal government to identify and categorize low-income families in Brazil. Created in 2001, the Unified Registry is now consolidated as the gateway to social programs for low-income families, turning into a strategic tool for Brazil's social policies, having approximately 75 million people registered - about 40% of the Brazil's population. Boasting more than 340 variables, the Unified Registry provides, in a single database, a complete picture of the living conditions of the most vulnerable Brazilian citizens.

Yes

CECAD has been evaluated at least twice. Between April and June 2017, the CECAD Working Group was created to evaluate the existing functionalities and to elaborate a proposal to update the tool. In addition to the civil servants of the Ministry, also participated experts on social assistance surveillance, and municipal and state managers of the Unified Registry - selected for being reference in data analysis and georeferencing. At the end of the WG, the participants prepared a report with recommendations to be implemented in order to strengthen the use of the tool by states and municipalities. In addition to the WG, CECAD was the object of a case study on the use of the tool by the Social Energy Tariff in Rio de Janeiro. The study reports the use of CECAD by employees of the electric power company and interviews residents of the Santa Marta community who access the benefit.

The case study on the impact of CECAD on the Social Energy Tariff in the city of Rio de Janeiro was documented in the publication “SAGI - Information and Knowledge for Social Development Policies”, elaborated in 2016 and made available on the SAGI Portal. The study concluded that CECAD was responsible for allowing the inclusion of 54% of the families beneficiaries of the Social Energy Tariff in 2015 – the first year of use of the tool by the electric power company. In that year, the number of beneficiary families tripled, representing savings of US$ 1 million to the beneficiaries. In 2017, once again CECAD was used, gathering automatically 80,000 households, an 13% increase on the customer base. The CECAD Working Group has developed a report with the diagnosis and proposals for a new version of the tool, which include functionalities that allow different levels of use – whether the basic level, with automatically-generated reports and georeferenced data from the Unified Registry displayed on municipality or state maps, or the advanced level, with the ability to generate customized reports from the choice of variables and also to download the Unified Registry database.

The main indicator was the use of CECAD by states and municipalities. The evaluation of the Working Group was based on the experience of managers – chosen for being a reference in the use of CECAD – to elaborate the diagnosis and the proposal to update and improve the tool. The possibility of increasing the capillarity of CECAD at the municipal level and the report of the navigation experience of participants were used as reference to further increase the use of CECAD by states and municipalities. The case study was based on the effective use of CECAD by employees of the electric power company of Rio de Janeiro and the increase in the number of the Social Energy Tariff benefit granted to the low-income population registered in the Unified Registry. In 2015, CECAD was responsible for allowing the inclusion of 54% of the families, leading to savings of about US$ 1 million to the beneficiaries. In 2017, CECAD included automatically 80,000 households in the social program, an 13% increase on the customer base.

Two secretariats of the MDS were crucial to the development of CECAD: the Secretariat for Evaluation and Information Management (SAGI) and the National Secretariat for Citizenship Income (SENARC). SAGI has expertise in developing systems and displaying data in various forms, for different target audiences of social development policies. SENARC has experience in the analysis and management of the Unified Registry. It is also worth mentioning the partnership between the state managers of the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS) and the federal managers of the Unified Registry and the Bolsa Família Program, who participated in pre-tests before the launch of the tool to define the functionalities that should be displayed and the changes required to the interface. The evaluation of the tool was carried out by SAGI in partnership with SENARC, SNAS, municipal and state managers. At the CECAD Working Group meetings, participants evaluated the current state of the tool and collectively built the final report with proposals for updates and improvements. Currently, the WG meets whenever there is the delivery of some new functionality of CECAD.

The implementation of any innovation requires constant evaluation and coping with difficulties. To develop CECAD, the technical team treated the barriers encountered as incentives to overcome challenges and learn new technologies for the development of an innovative system. The key lessons learned were: A. The interest of social policy managers in accessing data from the Unified Registry was fundamental for the development of the tool; B. The partnership between states, municipalities and user programs of the Unified Registry made a difference in the continuous improvement of the tool and in ensuring the quality of the data delivered; C. The small team responsible for CECAD, with no specific budget, created the opportunity to develop innovative solutions with technical independence; D. The automated use of CECAD data through web services for social services and programs has expanded CECAD access significantly in recent years. Since its launch in 2012, CECAD has been evolving and receiving several improvements, such as those being implemented due to the results of the CECAD Working Group. Currently, the tool is being further improved through the incorporation of georeferenced data from the Unified Registry. The next step will be the visualization of the historical data dating back to 2012.