Lighting up towns and lives
The Brazilian Government’s Light for All Program will take electricity to 65,000 consumers in rural communities with the help of Odebrecht
written by ◦ Marcus Neves photos by ◦ Roberto Rosa

As amazing as it seems, 126 years after Emperor Pedro II of Brazil granted Thomas Alva Edison the privilege of introducing electricity for public lighting in Brazil in 1879, many people in this country have never had access to this basic convenience of modern life: people like farmer Geraldo Guimarães Teixeira, his wife, Maria Lucia, and their ten-year-old son Lucas, who live on the Cascavel farm in the village of Matias. Their home is in the rural zone of Cláudio municipality, which is situated in the mid-western state of Minas Gerais, about 140 km from the state capital, Belo Horizonte. Until just a few weeks ago, young Lucas had to do his fifth-grade homework by the light of a kerosene lamp. By the time this issue is published, however, he will be able to switch on an electric light to read his textbooks and class notes.

Lucas and his family have joined the many beneficiaries of the National Program for Universal Access to Electric Energy Use, or “Light for All” program. The aim is to ensure that people in rural areas of Brazil who still do not have access to this public service have electricity in their homes by 2008. The target market is small rural producers who will use energy as a consumer good, and when applicable as a factor of production to energize farming and ranching activities.

In Minas Gerais, the “Light for All” program is run by the state power company, Cemig – Companhia Energética de Minas Gerais, which will meet its target two years early, by 2006, according to an agreement signed by Cemig and the Federal and State governments. To make this happen, the concession company’s sphere of operations has been divided into four lots, two of which – Lot 1 in the western part of the state and the area called the Minas Triangle; and Lot 4 in the northern area, known as the Drought Polygon – have been the responsibility of Odebrecht since the Group tendered the lowest bid through its subsidiary CBPO Engenharia.

Lucas’s mother, Maria Lucia, was overjoyed when she learned she would have electricity in her home. “If it weren’t for the arrival of electric light I’d have had to move away from here with my son. The doctor said that Lucas is too thin, underweight, and he needs to eat better. She told me to make fruit smoothies for him. But to do that, I’d need a blender, and a fridge to store the ingredients. So without electricity, the only way I could follow the doctor’s orders would be by going to live somewhere else,” she says.

Geraldo, Maria Lucia’s husband, is a dairy farmer who plants coffee on his small farm and has spent 13 years waiting and hoping for electric light. The family had to use a farm tractor battery to power a small portable black-and-white television so they could watch the prime-time soaps, or novelas. Like his wife, he is making plans: “Aside from the comforts it will bring – we’ll have a bigger TV, a fridge and even a blender – I’ll be able to buy a machine to grind cattle feed and a pump so we can have water in the house. Not only that but my wife makes cheese to sell in the market and we need a fridge to keep it fresh,” he explains, looking forward to a better future.

Light for All program

About 600 km north of their farm, in the village of Barreiros, located in the Vila Nova district of Montes Claros municipality, Agenário Alves de Amorim, his wife, Irani, and their two small children, Cristina and Felipe, are already enjoying these benefits: their home was electrified two weeks before the Guimarães Teixira family’s and in just a few days they equipped their modest home with a refrigerator and a color TV with a satellite dish. Agenário never tires of switching on the light as soon as it gets dark, smiling happily every time.

“It’s great to have electricity. We didn’t have a fridge or a TV. We had to fetch water from nearly a kilometer away, carrying it in two 200-liter drums that we hauled back on an ox cart. Now we have a water pump and we can just switch it on to make water pour from the faucets. The only modern convenience we had was a cell phone. Even so, we had to walk 5 kilometers to recharge the battery,” says Agenário, who raises livestock for sale, and plants corn, beans and squash for his family to eat.

After mobilizing the necessary workforce, Odebrecht’s teams began extending the new connections on October 20th. According to the contract with Cemig, they have until April 2007 to electrify the homes of 64,560 consumers and install a 27,307-km power network. This is a complex task, considering the logistics required to cover long distances including mountains, valleys and ravines.

“Logistics is one of the basic aspects of the key support for our operations because we are working in areas that can be very hard to reach. We have to install poles, transformers and the power network in all these places. Another requirement is educating and forming qualified teams in the areas of engineering and operations. These are the biggest challenges we’re facing on this job, and I guarantee that we will beat them. Every time a consumer is ’hooked up’ we can see the joy in their eyes, and that gives us tremendous satisfaction,” says Odebrecht Contract Director Sergio Neves.

Cemig President Djalma Bastos de Morais underscores the social impact of this program, which goes beyond including people who were living without electric power into mainstream Brazilian society. “The priority issue here is keeping people in the countryside. We are convinced that once everyone has access to electricity, this will be a major step towards stanching the rural exodus. And this will help solve most of the social problems we are facing now, both in the cities and the country. Therefore, this may be the most important government program in recent memory.”