The Human Project
The Human Project is a model for promoting economic and social prosperity in underestimated communities, based on the formation of human capital, in a long-term perspective, with the aim of removing poverty from people's minds and revealing the creative and entrepreneurial potential of the local people, so that they become the main protagonists of change.
The Human Project is carried out with the construction of Social Technologies to overcome the main factors that contribute to the poverty trap, with a special focus on the areas of basic education, health and entrepreneurial education, in a systemic, evolutionary and business-oriented approach, aiming at ensure sustainability and financial autonomy. All of this with people from the community acting as co-constructors of the solutions and then as reapplicators (scale) and as entrepreneurs, transforming these solutions into social businesses, with local roots and global appeal.
What are Social Technologies
Social Technologies are innovative solutions to social problems, developed in close partnership with the community, combining scientific and technological knowledge with the local knowledge, aiming to generate a solution that proves to be effective, scalable and sustainable.
Throughout the first stage of building a Social Technology, we put all our energy into a small group of people from the community who experience the problem to be faced, with whom we work in partnership with external experts to build a solution that really solves the problem, taking into account the local context. Therefore, at the end of this stage we have an effective solution and we have formed local human capital capable of ensuring continuity and taking on activities to disseminate the solution in other communities.
For the scalability activities, we adopt the concept of reapplication (different from replication), in which people from the communities that developed the solution
work in partnership with people from the new community to implement the solution, incorporating elements of local dynamics and customizing the Social Technology to ensure effectiveness in the new context. This scalability model ends up consolidating an entrepreneurial stance on the part of reapplicators, in addition to the direct impact on the generation of work and income, since reapplicators are remunerated for the work carried out.
Finally, after proving its scalability, the challenge is to find a model of financial and political sustainability for the Social Technology itself, preferably through self-management models, making the most of the protagonism of reapplicators. In other words, every Social Technology needs to generate at least one social business (profit or non-profit), which ensures its continuity, regardless of the external resources that was responsible for its development and validation and independent of changes in public management, which is one of the main problems of discontinuity of public policies in countries like Brazil.
In this sense, the adaptability power of a Social Technology is a differentiator that allows the solution to adapt to any new public policy in force.
Historic
2007
Conception of “The Human Project” model
2021
Santa Luzia do Itanhy announced as
World Capital of Social Technologies
2025
First reapplication of The Human Project
in another community
2023
Change name to The Human Project and model
ready to scale
2010
Change of headquarters to Santa Luzia do Itanhy
First projects: Synapse; Culture in Focus; Hb
2003
Foundation, with the name of Institute for Research in Technology and Innovation (IPTI), in São Paulo (SP)
2050
200 The Human Project communities spread
across the world, acting as a network
2055
The Human Project wins the Nobel Prize
(in a category not yet created)
Global Laboratory
The Human Project has been built and continually improved in Santa Luzia do Itanhy, due to the fact that it is a municipality whose social and economic reality is similar to most undervalued regions in Brazil and the world.
The municipality is located in the south of Sergipe, 80 km from the capital Aracaju and 245 km from Salvador, capital of the State of Bahia, which are the 2 closest large urban centers. In the latest UNDP assessment (2010), Santa Luzia do Itanhy occupied position 5,268 in the ranking of the Average Human Development Index (IDHM), among the 5,570 Brazilian municipalities.
Santa Luzia do Itanhy has a population of approximately 14 thousand inhabitants, of which 9 thousand (64%) live in rural communities, spread over an area of 325 km2. The population is primarily made up of black and mixed-race people and is distributed across 14 villages, generally connected to each other and to the headquarters by dirt roads, which makes it difficult for people to circulate within the municipality itself.
The local economy is essentially based on artisanal fishing and family farming, with 58% of families benefiting from Bolsa Família, that is, families in which the average monthly income per person is less than R$6.30. Only 836 people (5.9% of the population) have formal jobs, of which 68% are directly linked to the public sector.
Range
The Human Project was conceived with a perspective of gaining scale, from the moment the pilot experience in Santa Luzia do Itanhy reached a level of maturity and with sufficient human capital to be able to reapply the model in other communities, in Brazil and in the world.
We currently have the necessary conditions to begin the process of reapplication of the model, which envisages the creation in the community of a new social organization with a profile suited to The Human Project, which will be mentored by the nearest THP for a period of 5 years (estimative). Throughout this period, this new organization will learn to reapply priority Social Technologies, to develop new Social Technologies for local demands and to raise funds and build its own network of partners that ensures financial sustainability and autonomy in relation to the initial funding partner, because its main commitment It’s up to the community.
In a long-term vision, The Human Project will become an international network of prosperous communities, each with its own version of the model, but all acting within a platform of cooperation and exchange, capable of generating transformative energy and a growing spiral to promote human development for more communities, so that one day we can live in a more human, harmonious, true and beautiful world.
Team
Débora Bahia
Geraldo Filho
Giulia Santana
Raiane Ribeiro
Rodrigo Almeida
Ruan Nascimento
Raí Gomes
Saulo Barreto
Samantha Cordista
Marcel Magalhães
Thatiana Carvalho
Mariana Muniz
Awards
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