Race and Ethnicity by the Numbers JUDITH MORRISON
zilian middle-class consumers will be vital for determining the success of core business sectors in the country.
BEING COUNTED
Brazil may be the region’s leader in data collection and targeted social programs, but other countries have developed their own metrics to tackle the issue. Uruguay is a lesser-known example of innovation in
collecting and utilizing race and ethnicity data. The
Uruguayan government, through the Instituto Nacional
de Estadística and several agencies that are part of the
Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, work with civil society to
gather quality information about the Afro-descendant
population. They disaggregate this information by sub-racial identity (primary and secondary), and make the
information available to a wide range of policy-makers.
An example of the quality of data collected in Uruguay
is the La población afrodescendiente en Uruguay desde una
perspectiva de género report that disaggregates data on
race, ethnicity and gender. 9 This publication provides a
detailed sociodemographic analysis of education, labor
markets, poverty, health, and social programs by race,
ethnicity and gender. The findings of the report include
an overall estimate of the Afro-descendant population
( 10. 6 percent), an analysis of the salary wage gap ( 29 per-
cent), and a labor market analysis of where Afro-descen-
dants are employed in informal sector jobs: 72 percent
of Afro-descendant women are domestic employees,
while 64 percent of Afro-descendant men are day labor-
ers in construction or agriculture. The dissemination of
this information has led to new policy approaches and
sparked an important discussion on new programs tar-
geting Afro-descendants in the labor market.
What the IDB Is Doing
In 2000, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in conjunction with the World Bank, supported regional ini- tiatives to incorporate race and ethnicity into national
census reports, civil registries and
household surveys through the To-
dos Contamos initiative with two
conferences in Colombia (2000)
and Peru (2002). Todos Contamos
served as an initial opportunity for
representatives from national sta-
tistics and census offices through-
out Latin America to engage
ethnic- and race-based organiza-
tions on how to more accurately
count Afro-descendant and Indige-
nous populations and evaluate the
socioeconomic conditions in their
communities.
128 Americas Quarterly SPRING 2012
AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG
