Urban development in Brazil

Marinei Rosa Silva lives in a two-bedroom shack in a São Paulo favela with six of her children and three grandchildren. [Marcella Haddad]

In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, three million people live in shanty-towns or run-down tenements and more than 10,000 live on the streets.

CAFOD's partner APOIO (Portuguese for ‘support’) works with homeless people and tenement dwellers in São Paulo, helping them form housing associations and neighbourhood groups to lobby for better housing conditions and services. It also provides legal assistance to those threatened with eviction.

Marinei Rosa Silva, 41, is one of APOIO’s community workers and acts as a security guard for the organisation too.

Marinei lives in a two-bedroom shack in a favela – a shanty town – with six of her seven children and three grandchildren. With APOIO's help, she is now on a waiting list for accommodation due to be built by 2005.

“It’s difficult to imagine where I’d be now without APOIO. I am a fighter so I would probably be doing what I needed to do, but on my own, which is much harder. Having other people together really helps. And people are always there for advice.”

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