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Today, in many parts of the world, imagining an item you want and having it show up at your door an hour or a few days later is a convenience that\u2019s a click away. Cheeseburgers, cough medicine, batteries \u2014 with help from tech, you might not think twice about your ability to conjure thoughts into things.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s a kind of modern magic that doesn\u2019t work for everyone. More than 2 billion people globally don\u2019t have a precise physical address, making it hard to receive deliveries and access basic public services. This barrier to access affects people around the world, including parts of Africa and India, most emerging countries, various small villages in Europe, some Native American communities in the U.S., neighborhoods across Latin America and beyond.<\/p>\n
Take Parais\u00f3polis in Brazil, a favela where more than 100,000 people live in a dense area with unmarked streets, dead ends and unnumbered doors. \u201cFor years, most companies would not deliver goods in Parais\u00f3polis because it\u2019s like a maze and it\u2019s very hard to find places,\u201d says Wilson Rodrigues, a strategic partner manager for Google based in Brazil. \u201cAny delivery would require walking the last mile through alleys with little sense of direction. As a result, the residents of Parais\u00f3polis lacked access to services many of us take for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parais\u00f3polis residents had some creative workarounds for the issue, like having \u201cstreet presidents\u201d who would receive and distribute deliveries for nearby families, or getting goods delivered to stationary trucks with addresses that were easier to locate. But there were still major gaps in address access.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spoke to one resident who couldn\u2019t enroll her son in school without an address. She told me ambulances couldn\u2019t find homes and she couldn\u2019t get medicine delivered from hospitals,\u201d says Antonio Netto, who works on Google Cloud in Brazil.<\/p>\n
Alexandra Pereira Silva, an administrative assistant and Parais\u00f3polis resident, experienced this lack of access firsthand. \u201cIt was as if we didn\u2019t exist because no one found us,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Antonio and Wilson couldn\u2019t shake the idea that they needed to help and could put Google\u2019s technical resources to work. So, in October 2021, they banded together with other Googlers to piece together a plan to create thousands of digital addresses using Plus Codes, for the Parais\u00f3polis neighborhood.<\/p>\n
Plus Codes is an open-source technology that divides the entire world into grids based on latitude and longitude. Each grid box is then divided again and again, so you can eventually locate any spot on the planet with just a few numbers and letters. Plus Codes can then work like any other address to help people receive deliveries, get access to emergency services and find each other in apps like Google Maps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n