We chose goal #4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. We chose that goal because our client, Unicesumar, aims to democratize access to higher education all over Brazil, given that only 30% of Brazilians have access to college education. After the pandemic hit, many students lost their jobs and had to leave college. This decreased the number of college students and widened the social gap: less opportunity for those who lack the wherewithal means that they don’t have as much chance to make a better life for themselves. The end goal of the "Student Payment ID" campaign is to make sure no student is left behind during the pandemic, because only through education can we narrow the social gap in Brazil, the seventh most unequal country in the world today.

According to UNDP – The United Nations Development Programme – Brazil is the seventh most unequal country in the world. The most effective way to narrow that gap is through education. However, only 33% of the Brazilian population has access to higher education. Of those, only 36.68% complete their studies. The reasons for students to withdraw from their studies are many, but during the pandemic, most dropouts were driven by a reduction in income and job loss. Brazil’s Department of Education reported that more than 3 million students in 2020 alone were expected to drop out of college. These students are typically from a lower-income background that regard education as a life-changing opportunity. Students from higher-income families, however, will keep their studies, further widening our social gap and repeating our history of the poor getting poorer, and the rich getting richer.

More than 3 million students are expected to drop out of college in 2020. They all have one thing in common: a student ID card. They are leaving their courses, but they are holding on to their student cards. To help them continue their studies, Unicesumar – Brazil’s fourth largest university – now accepts student ID cards as payment. Unicesumar created a digital payment system that tracks information on student cards - photo, name and registration number - and cross-checks that information against an official student database, in order to authorize access to courses according to the student’s area of study. This turns a student ID card into digital money.

The Union of Higher Education Establishment Entities in the State of São Paulo expected more than 3 million students to drop out of college in 2020 alone. This could further widen the social gap in Brazil, already the seventh most unequal country in the world. These low-income students were now the target of Unicesumar, which created a campaign to help keep them at school. To that end, we spoke their language and started to accept their student cards as digital payment, given that one in every two Brazilians has a smartphone.

In order to accept all student ID cards in Brazil, we used Google’s Vision AI and trained AI to recognize their name, photo and registration number, as well as the logo and name of the college where they studied. This information was then cross-checked against the official student database stored at Brazil’s State Department’s official website. This enabled us to know when exactly a student left their studies and offer them a range of courses accordingly, to help keep them at school. A total of 2,608 education institutions and 8.6 million names were registered. All students holding a valid student ID card were tracked so that they could continue their studies even after dropping out of college during the pandemic.

Unicesumar reached 140,162 new students registered, an all-time high. More than 10 million hours were spent on the platform. After the campaign launched, many other institutions started offering tuition breaks out of fear they would lose their students to Unicesumar. In other words, the campaign changed an industry behavior, opening a window of opportunities for students.