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Brazilian city takes preventative healthcare from pilot to policy
A pilot preventative health program that reached 30,000 people can now help many more after a Brazilian city made it permanent.
Delivery Associates (DA) worked with Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk and other international partners on the ‘Steps to a Better Life’ program in Campinas, just over an hour’s drive from São Paulo.
The program encourages healthy habits, including good nutrition and physical activity, to prevent obesity and chronic disease. DA led the coalition of partners responsible for delivering the initiative's childhood obesity prevention component while also helping to implement the wider program.
Campinas municipality has now decreed it official policy, paving the way for the type of continuity and funding that only government adoption can provide.
“Today, we are turning an experience that worked into public policy,” Campinas Mayor Dário Saadi said after signing it in.
Globally, 35 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2024 according to the World Health Organization. Once considered a rich-country problem, childhood obesity is on the rise in low- and middle-income nations.
How Delivery Associates helped
DA is leading a Novo Nordisk-funded coalition with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and other partners to tackle the problem in Campinas and five other global cities. The program—Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative (COPI)—came under Novo Nordisk’s wider Cities for Better Health (CBH) initiative.
Along with academic partners, DA started by collecting baseline data on children's health, behavior, and education, building the evidence the program would be designed around.
“Preventing childhood obesity means recognizing that healthy choices are not made in a vacuum,” said Caio Sato, DA’s Brazil lead for COPI. “A child’s health depends on personal factors but also the conditions surrounding them and their families.”
DA embedded delivery experts in each city to help local governments turn strategy into progress that could be measured through partnerships, design, and the rollout of interventions specific to each location.
In Campinas, local workshops brought together government, schools, and community organizations to shape a package suited to the city’s needs.
Campinas coordinated across departments spanning health, education, sport, and social services. Each brought something different: the sports hall where children could play, the healthy meals served in school cafeterias, the community center where families gathered to learn about healthy eating.
Throughout, DA's role was to help embed the program into the municipality's own systems, strengthen local ownership, and build the conditions for the work to continue long after support ends.
To date, implementation has expanded across 12 of Campinas’ most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Researchers from the State University of Campinas will monitor and evaluate through 2027, producing evidence to inform future preventative health policies.
Public health pilots often stall before they scale or lose momentum once initial funding ends. Making a pilot permanent takes partners across health, education, and local government working toward a common goal and building the delivery infrastructure to sustain the work once external funding ends.
Patricia Byington, Head of Sustainability at Novo Nordisk Brazil, said seeing ‘Steps to a Better Life’ made permanent “shows how a partnership can help leave a concrete legacy for public policies that benefit the population’s health.”
To learn more about work on COPI, read the full case study here.
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