Final project of the course Mobile For Socio-Economic Development

1. The importance of telecommunications in the development of the Amazon region.
Brazil is a country of continental dimensions, but its population is distributed in a very unequal
way. Our study will focus on the following states of the Amazon region: Acre, Amapá,
Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia and Roraima.
The population of this region faces levels of social development below the national average,
and one of the ways viewed as an alternative to leverage the development of the region is the
investment in telecommunications infrastructure.
As demonstrated in the study published by World Bank, we can conclude that a 10 percentage
point increase in fixed broadband penetration would increase GDP growth by 1.21% in
developed economies and 1.38% in developing ones.
http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/391452529895999/WDR16-BP-Exploring-the-Relationship-
between-Broadband-and-Economic-Growth-Minges.pdf
But one of the major drawbacks is the region's low population density.
This region has a total area of 3,576,120 km² and a population of 16,627,024 inhabitants. If we
deduct the area occupied by the capitals of each state and also the resident population, we
reach an area of 3,508,544 km² and a population of 11,206,154 inhabitants.
With these data we verified that the population density inside the states is of 3,19
inhabitants/km ².
If we compare with the city of São Paulo, we will see that the population residing in the
interior of the 6 states of the Amazon region studied is 8% smaller than the population of the
city of São Paulo, but located in a 2,300-fold area.

2. Data (https://www.ibge.gov.br/estatisticas-novoportal/por-cidade-estado-estatisticas.html)
State Capital Population Area (km²)
Population
density
(hab/km²)
Acre Rio Branco 869.265 164.123,737 5,30
Amazonas Manaus 4.080.611 1.559.146,876 2,62
Amapá Macapá 829.494 142.828,521 5,81
Roraima Boa Vista 576.568 224.300,805 2,57
Rondônia Porto Velho 1.757.589 237.765,293 7,39
Pará Belém 8.513.497 1.247.955,238 6,82
TOTAL 16.627.024,000 3.576.120,470 4,65
State Capital Capital’s Population Capital’S area (km²)
Inside State
Population
Inside state
population
density
(hab/km²)
Acre Rio Branco 401.155 8.834,942 468.110 3,01
Amazonas Manaus 2.145.444 11.401,092 1.935.167 1,25
Amapá Macapá 493.634 6.503,458 335.860 2,46
Roraima Boa Vista 375.374 5.687,037 201.194 0,92
Rondônia Porto Velho 519.531 34.090,962 1.238.058 6,08
Pará Belém 1.485.732 1.059,458 7.027.765 5,64
TOTAL 5.420.870,000 67.576,949 11.206.154 3,19
State Capital Population Area (km²)
Population density
(hab/km²)
São Paulo São Paulo 12.176.866 1.521,110 8005,25

3. Figure 01: Area of the city of São Paulo compared to the area of Brazil
Figure 02: Area of the 6 states studied compared to the Brazilian area

4. This low demographic density of the region, together with the physical characteristics of the
relief, the deficient availability of electric energy, its dense and unique vegetation; in addition
to their predominantly waterways transport network, make difficult the investments in
telecommunications more complex, since the return of the invested capital will occur in a
much more extended period than in other regions of the country.
However given the amount of improvements that could be delivered to the population of the
region, such as information on the cultivation of species in the region, on climate, updated
prices of commodities, financial transactions through the cell phone; planting innovations.
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-
content/themes/theme_mobilefordevelopment/magri-repo/Creating-engaging-scalable-
solutions-for-agriculture.pdf
Another important study that shows how the expansion of mobile coverage can greatly
contribute to the development of agricultural regions is:
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/programme/magri/opportunities-in-
agricultural-value-chain-digitisation-learnings-from-uganda
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/agrivasmarketentrytoolkitgsmafinal-2.pdf

5. In this way, we verified the importance of carrying out the case studies of regions that also
have low demographic density, and whose climate and physical and environmental
characteristics imply adjustments and overcoming difficulties for their implementation.
In this way, we foresee that for the development of sustainable tourism in the Amazon region,
a great investment in telecommunications is required, mainly made by the mobile operators of
the region combined with government initiatives, subsidizing the implementation costs, thus
making the expansion more feasible current network.