For the first time, Brazil has entered the category of countries with “very high” human development. In 2024, the country reached 0.805 on the municipal human development index (MHDI), compared to 0.744 in 2012. The scale ranges from 0 to 1, with an indicator above 0.800 considered very high.

The information comes from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Brazil, which released a survey on Tuesday (May 26).

The index assesses parameters related to health and longevity, education, and income generation, broken down by race (black and white) and gender (women and men). The report covers the 13-year period from 2012 to 2024.

When the United Nations program began calculating this index 30 years ago, Brazil was a country with a low MHDI, that is, below 0.555.

Education

The factor that most contributed to the increase in the MHDI during this period was education – which rose from 0.679 in 2012 to 0.798 in 2024.

Betina Barbosa, coordinator of the Human Development Unit at UNDP Brazil, highlighted the Bolsa Família program, the federal government’s cash transfer program.

“It is the Bolsa Família program that removes a huge number of children from the workforce and provides them with the means and the obligation to attend school. So, here I see the direct effect of a Brazilian public policy,” she said.

Barbosa noted that the program, created in 2003, began to show results about ten years later, precisely when the first group of beneficiaries completed a satisfactory period of schooling.

Black Families

The improvement in education indicators during this period, Barbosa went on to note, is most significant among lower-income families, which are predominantly black families.

“This is where the black population begins to show better indicators and improved educational performance. Here, the policy takes a group that was previously excluded and brings it into the debate about human development. This has been happening in an upward trend since 2016,” she remarked.

She emphasized that there is no alternative for improving Brazil’s development without including the black population in the public policy agenda. The same applies to women. “These are two serious obstacles for Brazil – racial inequality and gender inequality.”

Health care and income

Barbosa explained that, among the sub-indices, public health care policy is the one that yields the most positive results for the country, having already achieved a “very high development” score in 2012 (0.829), due to the consolidation of Brazil’s public health care system, the SUS. Still, it is the one showing the slowest growth – it reached 0.860 in 2024.

The income parameter is growing at a slow pace, from 0.732 in 2012 to 0.760 in 2024, but is now at the high development level.

COVID-19

According to the UNDP, Brazil faced a systemic crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. In 2021, its MHDI stood at 0.757. Barbosa notes that the most concerning aspect was Brazil’s denial that this collapse would have negative effects on development.

“This denial and the lack of swift action to create public policies that combat systemic crises are serious,” she explained. “In terms of life expectancy, we have not yet recovered from the blow of COVID-19,” she added.

In this regard, child mortality is the indicator of greatest concern to the UNDP and is linked to public policies that require a rapid response. “There was not a sufficiently rapid response in the country regarding the impacts of COVID-19.”

The results of the survey were based on data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey, conducted by Brazil’s statistics bureau IBGE, in partnership with the technical team and researchers from the João Pinheiro Foundation.