Brazil, building
Bolsa Familia and the single registry behind it
Brazil built one national registry of low-income households and paid conditional transfers through it, going from 6.6 million benefits in December 2004 to a peak of 21.0 million in 2022 and 18.6 million in December 2025.
18,618,236 benefits, benefits paid in december, 2025. Ministry of Social Development, via IPEADATA, retrieved 2026-08-26.
The move, and what it needed
One registry of low-income households shared across every social programme, with payments made directly to a card held by the mother, conditional on school attendance and health checks.
Preconditions
- A payments network reaching poor municipalities
- Civil registration good enough to identify households
- Municipal staff to maintain the registry
Where it travelled: The conditional transfer plus single registry has been adopted across Latin America, Africa and Asia. The registry, not the transfer, is the reusable asset.
Limits: A benefit count is administrative and says nothing about whether the transfers reduced poverty. The programme was renamed and restructured twice between 2021 and 2023, so the series covers more than one design. The capability worth copying is the registry and the targeting, and neither has a number in this record.
This record describes what Brazil delivered. It is linked to Large project delivery because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from Brazil
21 other deliveries from this country.
Brazil's central bank specified, built and ran a mandatory instant payment rail that settled 7.98 billion transactions in July 2026, for 152 million people and 14 million firms transacting in that month.
GOV.BR federal identity and service platform
Brazil consolidated federal public services behind one identity platform, reporting 175 million active accounts and 5,179 digital services in May 2026.
Sistema Unico de Saude, universal public health system
Brazil wrote a right to health into the 1988 constitution and built a single public system that covers everybody in the country, and the WHO service coverage index for Brazil rose from 71 in 2000 to 84 in 2023.
Plano Real, the 1994 currency stabilisation
Brazil ended four decades of high inflation with a staged currency reform, taking annual consumer price inflation from 2,075.9 percent in 1994 to 3.2 percent in 1998.
Programa Nacional de Imunizacoes, and its erosion
Brazil's national immunisation programme reached 99 percent DPT coverage in 2003 and held above 95 percent for a decade, then fell to 68 percent by 2021 and had recovered to 91 percent by 2024.
Luz para Todos, rural electrification
Brazil connected the last rural households to electricity through a national programme run with the state and private distributors, taking access from 94.4 percent of the population in 2000 to 99.8 percent in 2024.
Embrapa, a fifty-year bet on tropical agriculture
Brazil created a public agricultural research corporation in 1973 to make acidic tropical soils productive, kept it funded across every change of government since, and cereal production rose from 46.5 million tonnes in 2000 to 155.9 million in 2023.
Fully electronic national elections
Brazil has run every election on electronic voting machines since 2000, across an electorate that reached 155.9 million voters in 2024, with results published the same evening.
Proalcool, the fuel substitution after the oil shock
Brazil answered the 1973 oil shock by mandating ethanol blending and building a national fuel alcohol industry, taking production from 580 thousand cubic metres in 1975 to 38,199 in 2025, and from 2003 flex-fuel engines moved the choice to the driver.
Deepwater and pre-salt oil production
Brazil developed deepwater extraction, found the pre-salt fields in 2006 and produced them at depths of more than 5,000 metres, with national oil production rising from 71,844 thousand cubic metres in 2000 to 219,032 in 2025.
BNDES, the national development bank
Founded in 1952, Brazil's federal development bank provides long-term financing and investment across the national economy, and it disbursed R$169.7 billion in 2025.
CAPES, federal postgraduate funding
Founded in 1951, CAPES built a national postgraduate funding and evaluation system, and by 1995 Brazil's system had more than 60,000 students across over 1,000 master's and 600 doctoral courses.
Lei de Informática, a sectoral industrial policy
Law 8.248/1991 tied information-technology incentives to annual research, development and innovation investment of at least 5 percent of eligible domestic gross revenue, creating a predictable regime for sectoral capability.
Casa da Moeda do Brasil, the national mint
Founded in 1694, Brazil's national mint has remained a public institution through colonial, imperial and republican regimes and now produces currency, identity documents and passports after more than 330 years of operation.
Itaipu Binacional, the treaty-built power system
Brazil and Paraguay built and operate Itaipu through a treaty-based binational entity, which reached 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity and has supplied both countries since the first unit entered operation in 1984.
Cadastro Único, the unified social registry
Since 2001, Cadastro Único has identified and characterized low-income families across Brazil and has become the entry point for more than 40 federal, state and municipal social programmes.
Portal da Transparência, the federal open-books system
Launched in 2004, Portal da Transparência has spent 20 years publishing federal revenue, expenditure, personnel and transfer information so citizens can inspect how public money is used.
INEP, the standing education statistics institution
Created in 1937, INEP built a standing education statistics and census system that lets federal, state and municipal actors see schools, students and policy results across Brazil, while its historical archive now spans 218.68 linear metres.
CGEE, the strategic studies center
Created in 2001, the Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos was designed to produce prospective studies and long-term recommendations for Brazilian science, technology and innovation policy, with 273 researchers and specialists signing its creation record.
Telebras, the telecom system that was dismantled
Created in 1972, Telebras coordinated Brazil's state telecom system until its 1998 privatisation, when 54 concessionaires were split out and the state moved from operating the network to regulating and universalising service.
EMBRAPII, industry-led applied research
Created in 2013, EMBRAPII connects companies to public and private research units through shared-risk funding, and it contracted a record 811 new industrial research projects in 2025.
The same gap elsewhere
8 deliveries linked to Large project delivery in other countries.
X-Road national data exchange layer
Estonia has run one data exchange layer for the whole state since 2001, and in July 2026 it carried 374.9 million queries between 1,000 connected organizations, 251 of them government bodies, across 3,785 services.
Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana bank accounts
India opened 590.9 million basic bank accounts through existing banks from 2014, holding 3.17 lakh crore rupees in deposits as of 19 August 2026.
Electricity supply rebuilt on renewable sources
Uruguay rebuilt its electricity supply between 2010 and 2017 through public tenders and long-term contracts, and in 2025 fossil fuels produced 293 GWh of the 15,855 GWh generated, so 98.2 percent came from hydro, wind, biomass and solar.
Plan Ceibal, one connected laptop per child
Uruguay gave a connected laptop to every child in public primary school from 2007, the first country to do it nationally, and the household survey found a Ceibal computer in the homes of 35.8 percent of the population in 2018.
Seguro Popular, and its abolition
Mexico built public health insurance for people outside social security from 2003 and abolished it in 2020, and CONEVAL measured the share of the population without access to health services rising from 16.2 percent in 2018 to 39.1 percent in 2022.
Sure Start children's centres, and their erosion
England built a national network of early-childhood centres reaching 3,632 sites by August 2009, then closed or hollowed out a large part of it after funding was cut, with the official count at 3,123 by October 2017 and independent estimates near 1,000 closures.
South Africa ran one of the world's cheapest reliable grids and extended it to most of the population after 1994, then under-invested and lost the surplus, reaching 335 days of load shedding in 2023 before recovering to 83 days in 2024.
Measles elimination, and its erosion
The United States eliminated endemic measles transmission by 2000 through school-entry vaccination requirements, and falling coverage brought 2,777 confirmed cases by August 2026, the most since 1991, against 285 in all of 2024.