SMART CITIZEN’S

TECHNOLOGY ENGAGES COMMUNITIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES

INNOVATIONS

OF THE WORLD

As Featured In:

INNOVATE™ Curitiba

As Featured In:

INNOVATE™ Curitiba

With the AMA platform, this traditional logic is broken because residents of socially relevant areas start taking care of their territory. The local leader, who would already take care of the neighborhood, now has the opportunity for paid collaboration. The service is georeferenced and constantly evaluated by neighbors and the municipality in the AMA app. As a result, the city avoids logistics costs and achieves better results in areas that traditionally would not be reached by the government.

Addressing the challenges of the 2030 agenda, such as the global call to action to end poverty, and protect the environment and climate, Smart Citizen has initiated a true revolution in one of Brazil’s oldest public services. With public participation and the use of technology, in just two years of operation, the startup is transforming the public cleaning service in Brazilian cities. Resulting from the creative and innovative capacity of its team, Smart Citizen is the developer of the AMA Platform Environmental Agents. In partnership with the local government, the solution promotes the population’s engagement in cleaning and preserving their neighborhoods, generating income, and creating environmental awareness.

In Manaus, in the Amazon, in partnership with the Zero Waste Institute Brazil (ILZB), the AMA Platform collaborated with Sara and her community of fishermen to remove tons of plastic waste from the Igarapé do Gigante, a tributary of the Rio Negro, with total traceability of the work and 100% remote monitoring from Curitiba, Paraná, promoting a significant social and environmental impact.

The service, in addition to being innovative, is disruptive, says Marcelo Crivano, the creator of the AMA platform and CEO of Smart Citizen. He notes that for 147-years, since the first contract of Aleixo Gary with the City of Rio, public cleaning in Brazil has been done in the same way. Workers leave the peripheral areas of the city where they live to clean commercial and better infrastructure areas.

In Florianópolis, a city in the southern region of Brazil with over 500,000 inhabitants, in just over a year, the AMA Platform impacted thousands of people – especially in poorer neighborhoods where traditional cleaning services did not reach. The 600 local leaders carried out more than 60,000 activities, including sweeping sidewalks and public roads, unclogging storm drains, weeding, reporting illegal dumping of garbage, creating community gardens, and other environmental education activities with the neighborhood. With a flexible schedule and receiving monthly compensation for services rendered, each leader is responsible for caring for a micro-area in their community.

The success of the solution can be confirmed by relevant international awards. In March 2023, in the city of Austin, Texas, the AMA platform received the “Best Bootstrap Company” award, granted by SXSW for promising businesses that have creativity and potential across all categories of the competition without having received previous funding. This was the first time in the event’s 15-year history that a Brazilian company received the South by Southwest award, the leading global innovation festival.

The groundbreaking initiative also won the Climate Smart Cities Challenge in 2022, promoted by UN-Habitat and the Swedish Agency for Innovation. For the challenge in Curitiba, the AMA Platform – Environmental Agents was the big winner with its social network and environmental stewardship technologies. In January 2022, 45 finalists were selected from almost 200 proposals. To determine the winners, they were evaluated based on three criteria: whether they were ready to be demonstrated in a real environment, suitable to integrate a team, and their potential impact on the population.

From 2024, the AMA Platform will lead the group of companies that will implement the award-winning model to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a focus on energy sustainability, and waste management in the Vale do Pinhão and Vila Torres, in the Rebouças neighborhood. In addition to the AMA Platform, Curitiba Smart Neighborhoods includes the Ambiente Livre Collective and the Swedish companies Smart Green Station and Nudgd.

Thus, the AMA Platform continues its innovative journey with the mission of educating, connecting, and rewarding people to collaborate in the management of urban environmental problems.