São Paulo – Brazilian researcher Júnia Quiroga, the general Evaluation and Monitoring coordinator of the Information Evaluation and Management Secretariat at the Ministry of Social Development and Hunger Alleviation (MDS), presented yesterday (28), in Marrakech, Morocco, a paper about the difficulties in identifying and counting street populations.
Júnia, who coordinated the National Research on Population Living in the Streets, promoted between 2007 and 2008, made the presentation at a panel on the counting of populations that are difficult to measure at the 26th International Population Conference. This is the first time that the event, which is organized every four years by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (Iussp), takes place in an Arab and Muslim country.
The researcher said to ANBA, by telephone, that she pointed out methodological and political aspects of the work of counting street populations. As they are people who are in constant movement, and spread out throughout the city, it is hard to collect statistics about them.
To work on the research, Júnia and her team based themselves on previous experiences and created new methods to reach more trustworthy results. Before the interviews themselves, studies were conducted in the cities involved (71 in all): the researchers crossed the cities at night to check whether the street residents concentrate at a specific point and to have an idea of the number of people in this situation. This work, according to her, was essential to define the necessary number of interviewers.
There was also, according to Júnia, broad treatment of the professionals involved. "It is not enough to be competent, you must also be respectful," she said. Furthermore, the counting took place at night, to eliminate the counting of people who spend the day in the street, but in truth do not live in them.
The research also had to be done quickly, as these populations tend to move very much, so that the same person was not interviewed more than once. After the fieldwork, screening took place to eliminate the double interviews.
In the political aspect, according to Júnia, the research innovated by using people who have already lived on the streets in the team as well as organisations that operate in providing assistance to these populations. This helped, for example, in the mapping of sites where the residents protect themselves, often hidden from the eyes of those who are unaware. These members did not work as interviewers, but as supporters, and represented 20% of the 1,479 people who worked on the study.
According to the researcher, the work was also considered successful due to the low number of people addressed who refused to answer the questions: 13% of the total. In the 71 cities researched, 31,922 street dwellers were identified. The study involved all capitals in the country, except for São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Porto Alegre, which had recently developed studies of the sort, and 48 cities with over 300,000 inhabitants.
The research, disclosed in April last year, served as a subsidy to the National Plan for Social Inclusion of People Living in the Streets, soon to be released by the government. The plan, according to Júnia, involves seven ministries, the Special Secretariat of Human Rights at the Presidency of the Republic, the Federal Attorney’s Office, as well as organisations of the civil society for defence of the rights of street dwellers.
She added that the system used in the research may be replicated, and improved, by other countries and that there was interest by those who participated in the panel. Apart from the work developed by Júnia, there were presentations by two French researchers and an Argentine researcher based in Mexico, one about sex professionals and HIV, another about rare cases of disease and the last about how French-speaking countries, especially France and Switzerland, deal with cases of female mutilation.
Today, Júnia is going to participate in one more panel of the conference, this time not as a speaker, but as a debater. One of the works to be shown is about food and nutritional safety in Brazil, to be presented by Paulo Mitchell, of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
*Translated by Mark Ament
