Addressing is a crucial infrastructure connecting people with essential services. Uruguay has been investing in its addressing system to foster the socio-economic development for those living in irregular settlements.
A Uruguayan woman named Mary has no address. She gives directions to her home with instructions to look for the house with three pine trees."If one day they cut them down, I don't know how I'm going to manage," she said in an article about "Number Your Neighborhood" 2011 project to provide addresses to more people in suburban areas, in which the Uruguayan Post partnered with the NGO “Programa Cardijn.”
More than a decade later, the post continues to strive for ways to improve the country’s addressing system for more homes and businesses, this time promoting a national address system and training other participants in this effort.
“Addresses are part of the physical infrastructure of a country,” said Gustavo Miraballes, the post’s Geomatics Unit Manager, the division of Uruguay Post responsible for managing its address database. “Addresses facilitate access to different services, such as communications and logistics, but also allow the rapid location of a house affected by an accident achieving a rapid response from firefighters, ambulances or the police.”
Hundreds of thousands of residents in the South American country live in homes without addresses, from those in irregular settlements to other rural and urban regions.
The post is now working with the country’s Spatial Data Infrastructure, or IDEuy, which manages the country’s national address database, to improve and promote a single addressing system that will create efficiencies and bring more services to residents.
Uruguay Post is investing more than USD 100,000 a year to improve its current addressing system, which was the original database for the country. This includes steps to upgrade its technology and algorithms that interpret addresses to allow it to feed seamlessly into the national address database, now managed by IDEuy.
The post will also support other organizations, such as village halls, that are tasked with naming transit routes and assigning property numbers, but that may not have sufficient education to sustain such a system.
The result will be a unified addressing system that allows for exchange of information with the IDEuy’s national database. This includes preparing for the integration of verified addresses that will come ahead of the 2023 census. The post will also encourage other actors to collaborate with maintaining the database, Miraballes said.
These efforts support the UN Sustainable Development Goals 1 (No Poverty) and 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).
“Addresses favour access to social protection policies and public services, and promote local development by facilitating the generation of income in households,” Miraballes said. With addresses, residents are able to offer services and conduct business more easily from their homes.
The addresses also allow greater social integration in cities and human settlements, increasing inclusion, he said.
Learn more about how UPU provides Addressing Assistance and Addressing Solutions to its member countries.