🇧🇷Brazil

• Pix instant payment system (Building)

  Brazil's central bank specified, built and ran a mandatory instant payment rail that settled 7.98 billion transactions in July 2026, for 152 million people and 14 million firms transacting in that month.

• GOV.BR federal identity and service platform (Building)

  Brazil consolidated federal public services behind one identity platform, reporting 175 million active accounts and 5,179 digital services in May 2026.

• Sistema Unico de Saude, universal public health system (Building)

  Brazil wrote a right to health into the 1988 constitution and built a single public system that covers everybody in the country, and the WHO service coverage index for Brazil rose from 71 in 2000 to 84 in 2023.

• Plano Real, the 1994 currency stabilisation (Adaptability)

  Brazil ended four decades of high inflation with a staged currency reform, taking annual consumer price inflation from 2,075.9 percent in 1994 to 3.2 percent in 1998.

• Programa Nacional de Imunizacoes, and its erosion (Building)

  Brazil's national immunisation programme reached 99 percent DPT coverage in 2003 and held above 95 percent for a decade, then fell to 68 percent by 2021 and had recovered to 91 percent by 2024.

• Luz para Todos, rural electrification (Building)

  Brazil connected the last rural households to electricity through a national programme run with the state and private distributors, taking access from 94.4 percent of the population in 2000 to 99.8 percent in 2024.

• Embrapa, a fifty-year bet on tropical agriculture (Anticipation)

  Brazil created a public agricultural research corporation in 1973 to make acidic tropical soils productive, kept it funded across every change of government since, and cereal production rose from 46.5 million tonnes in 2000 to 155.9 million in 2023.

• Bolsa Familia and the single registry behind it (Building)

  Brazil built one national registry of low-income households and paid conditional transfers through it, going from 6.6 million benefits in December 2004 to a peak of 21.0 million in 2022 and 18.6 million in December 2025.

• Fully electronic national elections (Building)

  Brazil has run every election on electronic voting machines since 2000, across an electorate that reached 155.9 million voters in 2024, with results published the same evening.

• Proalcool, the fuel substitution after the oil shock (Adaptability)

  Brazil answered the 1973 oil shock by mandating ethanol blending and building a national fuel alcohol industry, taking production from 580 thousand cubic metres in 1975 to 38,199 in 2025, and from 2003 flex-fuel engines moved the choice to the driver.

• Deepwater and pre-salt oil production (Building)

  Brazil developed deepwater extraction, found the pre-salt fields in 2006 and produced them at depths of more than 5,000 metres, with national oil production rising from 71,844 thousand cubic metres in 2000 to 219,032 in 2025.

• BNDES, the national development bank (Building)

  Founded in 1952, Brazil's federal development bank provides long-term financing and investment across the national economy, and it disbursed R$169.7 billion in 2025.

• CAPES, federal postgraduate funding (Learning)

  Founded in 1951, CAPES built a national postgraduate funding and evaluation system, and by 1995 Brazil's system had more than 60,000 students across over 1,000 master's and 600 doctoral courses.

• Lei de Informática, a sectoral industrial policy (Anticipation)

  Law 8.248/1991 tied information-technology incentives to annual research, development and innovation investment of at least 5 percent of eligible domestic gross revenue, creating a predictable regime for sectoral capability.

• Casa da Moeda do Brasil, the national mint (Building)

  Founded in 1694, Brazil's national mint has remained a public institution through colonial, imperial and republican regimes and now produces currency, identity documents and passports after more than 330 years of operation.

• Itaipu Binacional, the treaty-built power system (Coordination)

  Brazil and Paraguay built and operate Itaipu through a treaty-based binational entity, which reached 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity and has supplied both countries since the first unit entered operation in 1984.

• Cadastro Único, the unified social registry (Trust)

  Since 2001, Cadastro Único has identified and characterized low-income families across Brazil and has become the entry point for more than 40 federal, state and municipal social programmes.

• Portal da Transparência, the federal open-books system (Trust)

  Launched in 2004, Portal da Transparência has spent 20 years publishing federal revenue, expenditure, personnel and transfer information so citizens can inspect how public money is used.

• INEP, the standing education statistics institution (Learning)

  Created in 1937, INEP built a standing education statistics and census system that lets federal, state and municipal actors see schools, students and policy results across Brazil, while its historical archive now spans 218.68 linear metres.

• CGEE, the strategic studies center (Anticipation)

  Created in 2001, the Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos was designed to produce prospective studies and long-term recommendations for Brazilian science, technology and innovation policy, with 273 researchers and specialists signing its creation record.

• Telebras, the telecom system that was dismantled (Adaptability)

  Created in 1972, Telebras coordinated Brazil's state telecom system until its 1998 privatisation, when 54 concessionaires were split out and the state moved from operating the network to regulating and universalising service.

• EMBRAPII, industry-led applied research (Coordination)

  Created in 2013, EMBRAPII funds industrial research that companies contract with accredited public and private research units, and it contracted a record 811 new projects in 2025, 25.35% more than in 2024.

• SIBRATEC, the national technology networks (Coordination)

  To foster university-firm interaction, the Federal Government set up SIBRATEC, coordinated by the Ministry of Science and Technology with FINEP, BNDES and INMETRO taking part, as a national system of 56 research and development networks by 2010: 14 innovation-centre networks, 20 technological-service networks and 22 state-level extension networks.

• SUS health councils, permanent public participation (Shared Purpose)

  Since Law 8.142 established them in 1990, Brazil's SUS has required permanent, deliberative health councils at the national, state and municipal levels, with users holding 50 percent of seats and health workers and government or providers holding 25 percent each.

• Salário mínimo and its permanent revaluation rule (Adaptability)

  Brazil's Congress and president established a permanent annual valorização do salário mínimo in Law 14.663/2023, setting the national floor at R$1,320 from May 2023 and linking later adjustments to INPC inflation plus real GDP growth from two years earlier.

• Banco Central regulatory sandbox, first cycle (Experimentation)

  Brazil's central bank opened its regulatory sandbox to applications in February 2021, received 52 projects, admitted seven to test under relaxed rules from 6 December 2021, and ran the cycle for one year with one permitted extension.

• MAI/DAI, innovation scholarships for research with partner companies (Coordination)

  Brazil's research council CNPq, with CAPES co-funding the 2024 call, has run four calls of its Mestrado e Doutorado Acadêmico para Inovação programme (2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024), in which about 80 science and technology institutions and more than 200 companies had taken part and at least 5,000 scholarships had been granted by 2024 for undergraduate and graduate student research on projects defined with partner firms.

• Educação de Jovens e Adultos (EJA), and its erosion (Learning)

  Brazil's Educação de Jovens e Adultos, the second-chance basic education modality delivered mostly by public school networks, enrolled 2,962,322 students in 2021 and 2,252,069 in 2025, a fall of about 24 percent in four years, according to INEP's School Census.

• Auxílio Reconstrução, the federal cash grant after the 2024 Rio Grande do Sul floods (Adaptability)

  After the floods that began in late April 2024 in Rio Grande do Sul, the federal government paid R$ 2.1 billion in Auxílio Reconstrução to 429,000 families, according to the balance its extraordinary secretary for the reconstruction of Rio Grande do Sul presented to a Chamber of Deputies committee on 12 February 2025.

Fill a gap, file evidence or challenge an indicator at github.com/envisioning/national-capability-benchmark. The docs explain the method and decisions.