The situation, which has remained virtually unchanged in recent years, is worse in the North and Northeast regions. A total of 74.156 million Brazilians, or 35.7% of the total population, are living in these conditions, according to the Summary of Social Indicators (SIS), based on 2018 data, released on Wednesday, the 6th, by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Despite this scourge, internet access, available to 166 million Brazilians, continues to grow rapidly.
Of the total number of people living in homes without sewerage, 63%, or 46.526 million people, live in the North or Northeast. In the North, 79.3% of residents live in households without sewerage. In the Northeast, the proportion of the local population living in these conditions is 57.1%, which is also above the national average.
“It’s not just that the population is more rural. Even urban households in the North and Northeast have less access to sanitation than other urban households in other regions,” said Bruno Perez, a specialist with the IBGE’s Coordination of Population and Social Indicators.
The situation has changed little in recent years, as the proportion of households without sewer service in 2016 stood at 36.3%. In the North, the problem decreased between 2016 and 2018, but only slightly, from 82.3% of the region’s total population to the current 79.3%.
Technology
Even without sewer service at home, Brazilian families own appliances such as refrigerators and telephones. In 2018, 96.0% of the population lived in households with at least one landline telephone or at least one resident with a cell phone. A refrigerator was present in the homes of 98.3% of Brazilians.
Thanks to mobile technology, the widespread adoption of cell phones has brought the internet to the majority of the population: 79.9% of Brazilians live in households with internet access, whether fixed-line or mobile. This means that 166 million Brazilians already have some form of access to the internet. Even among those living below the poverty line, 65.9% have internet access at home, whether mobile or fixed-line.
“Access (to the internet) is mainly via cell phone,” said Perez of the IBGE.
Internet access is growing rapidly; in 2016, 68% of Brazilians lived in households with internet access. In practice, between 2016 and 2018, 26.934 million people gained some form of internet access at home.
