About the organization
The UNICEF Brazil Social Policy area works to strengthen public policies aimed at reducing inequalities that affect children and adolescents, with a special focus on the country’s most vulnerable territories, such as the Legal Amazon and the Semi-arid region. Through evidence generation, advocacy, and institutional capacity building, the area promotes strategies that expand children’s and adolescents’ access to essential rights, helping public policies become more efficient, localized, and sensitive to the racial, social, and regional inequalities that impact childhood in Brazil.
Socioeconomic context
According to the IBGE, Brazilian social assistance operates on a social base that is still under significant pressure: in 2024, 23.1% of the population was in a situation of poverty and 3.5% in extreme poverty; without social programs, these percentages would rise to 28.7% and 10.0%. Regionally, the Northeast still concentrated the highest proportion of poor people (39.4%), and the North and Northeast also recorded the highest proportions of poor workers. According to the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family and Fight Against Hunger (MDS), the Cadastro Único remains the main base for identifying vulnerability, with approximately 94 million people and more than 40 million families registered as of January 2025, of which more than 28 million families were low-income. Meanwhile, the study ‘The cost of social assistance in Brazil’, produced by the National Social Assistance Fund (FNAS) and UNICEF, shows the concrete pressure on the network: in 2022, in a nationally representative base of 3,911 municipalities, more than 30 million services were recorded at CRAS units for a population of over 110 million people; there were 25.3 million families in the Cadastro Único, 15 million in poverty, a higher relative concentration of families per team in the North and Northeast, and signs of service overload in the South.
Project objective
To produce more precise evidence on the real cost of the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS), especially regarding equipment maintenance and the difference between basic and special protection, to qualify technical and budgetary decisions, strengthen system funding, provide support to the MDS and municipalities, and reintroduce the need for minimum and more stable resources for social assistance into the national debate. The central deliverable is a report with results and recommendations for the Federal Government, states, municipalities, and Congress.
Partners
| Public Sector |
| National Social Assistance Fund (FNAS) Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family and Fight Against Hunger (MDS) |
Dialogues with public policies
The work is coordinated with the FNAS and MDS, with already negotiated access to data and a focus on supporting technical and strategic decisions within SUAS; furthermore, the results and recommendations are directed at the MDS, Congress, states, and municipalities, with the explicit potential to reintroduce PEC 383/2017 into the debate, strengthen municipal funding, and induce improvements in SUAS financial and budgetary management.
