CDI/Recode – Community IT & Citizenship Schools in Brazil's Favelas

CDI (Comitê para Democratização da Informática), founded by Rodrigo Baggio in 1995 in the Morro Dona Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro's Botafogo district, pioneered a model of community-run 'Escolas de Informática e Cidadania' (IT and Citizenship Schools) that pairs basic computer training with citizenship and entrepreneurship education for low-income youth. The organisation rebranded as Recode in 2015 and expanded its network to 15 countries, including Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, the UK and the US.

The network reports approximately 1.9 million people reached cumulatively since 1995, with 69,306 people served in 2025 through 23-24 regional offices in Brazil; at its peak scale the network reported 842 installations globally. Its UK affiliate, Apps for Good, separately reports reaching over 100,000 students across roughly 655 schools. Most of these cumulative figures are self-reported by the organisation.

An independent, graduate-level evaluative study at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) assessed a CDI digital-inclusion project in Alvorada (RS), providing genuine third-party academic scrutiny of the model, though scoped to a single site rather than the national network. A separately cited external evaluation by 'IDECA' could not be independently accessed or verified and is therefore not used as a basis for scoring here.

Caveats: documented criticism holds that CDI/Recode has relied on sponsorship from major proprietary IT vendors (e.g. Microsoft) rather than favouring open-source systems, which critics argue limits the practical usefulness of what graduates learn. Because the network operates through many semi-autonomous local schools, quality and impact likely vary significantly by site, and the Alvorada/RS study result should not be assumed representative of the whole network.

Read the full analysis: https://recode.org.br/