Renato Rosas knows what poverty feels like. The musician and biomedical salesman grew up in one of Brazil’s biggest favelas, in the Amazon city of Belém. Relatives still live in the wooden stilt houses that line the black, polluted rivers running into Guajará Bay.

“It is the most extreme poverty,” he said of the Baixadas da Estrada Nova Jurunas neighbourhood where floods, deadly sucuri snakes lurking in floating rubbish and armed drug gangs are among the challenges.

In March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to hit, Brazil’s state governors closed schools, businesses and shops, shutting off the income of favela residents and leaving them with dwindling supplies of food. More than half of Belém’s 1.5 million people live in favelas and children normally fed at school were at home going hungry. “People were in need,” Rosas, 38, said.

He and colleagues from the music and education project Farofa Black started raising money for food parcels – known as cesta básica, the basic basket in Brazil – to deliver around the community.

“When we stop at one of these places people come running. It is very fast, it all runs out very quickly,” he said.

Renato Rosas, left, helps with food distribution in Belém.

Scenes like these are being repeated across Brazil, where nearly 14 million people live in densely populated favelas in this deeply unequal country. As of Thursday, Brazil had 22,169 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 1,123 deaths, although under reporting means numbers are likely to be much higher.

Community leaders, activists and organisers of social projects in favelas in São Paulo, Belém, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Manaus, Belo Horizonte and São Luís have been delivering food and hygiene kits to desperate residents as hunger begins to bite.

They worry that coronavirus could spread rapidly in the crowded houses and alleyways, where there is often no basic sanitation, health services can be precarious and diseases such as tuberculosis and Zika have thrived.

The pandemic has exposed how little the Brazilian state knows about its poorest citizens, with the government grappling for weeks over an emergency monthly payment of $116 for three months to up to 25 million “informal” workers and the unemployed before launching an app last Tuesday. It also froze electricity bills for low-income Brazilians for three months.

People unable to access the payment reportedly queued at tax offices and government banks in cities across Brazil. Some lacked the right social security numbers and as activists noted, not everybody has a mobile phone or credit for internet access.

Favelas nationwide were already organising. Some activists, like Rosas in Belém, are part of the national G10 favela network, set up by Gilson Rodrigues, president of the residents association in São Paulo’s huge Paraisópolis favela. G10 held a summit there last November, which Rosas attended. Its organisational methods are being adopted across Brazil.

As Rodrigues pointed out in a video widely shared on social media, the word favela has been conspicuously absent in government communication. “It’s like we’re not Brazilians and we don’t exist,” he told the Guardian.

Lockdown in the favelas. Photograph: Nicoló Lanfranchi/The Guardian

Paraisópolis has delivered 15,000 food parcels, set up a communal kitchen and launched a scheme for people to “adopt” maids laid off from jobs in the upscale neighbourhoods where coronavirus first emerged. “Street presidents” explain the importance of social distancing and hand hygiene, organise donations and organise the two doctors, three nurses and three ambulances the favela has hired. It is even building a field hospital.

“We are mounting a war structure because we believe we are being abandoned to our own fate,” Rodrigues said. “We believe the cases are coming.”

A WhatsApp image of food distribution.

In Belo Horizonte’s Aglomerado da Serra favela, 45 volunteers distributed 3,500 food parcels, said Cristiane Pereira, president of its residents association. Its “village presidents’”were adapted from G10. “We learned the right way to mobilise the community,” Pereira said.

In Rio de Janeiro, Raniele Batista, 38, had just received a food parcel in the sprawling Complexo do Alemão favela.

“We have nine people at home, seven children, my husband was just laid off, the situation gets worse and worse,” she said. “Thank God I got a food parcel here but I don’t know about tomorrow.”

Her donation came from Champion Embrace (Abraço Campeão), a martial arts project run by resident Alan Duarte, now delivering food parcels to 400 families. “We are very scared that coronavirus will hit favelas hard,” Duarte said. Deaths from coronavirus have already been reported in Rio’s Rocinha, Maré and Manguinhos favelas.

Research by São Paulo’s Locomotiva research institute and Favelas Central (CUFA), a national organisation, found that 80% of working favela residents had already lost income over the coronavirus crisis. Half of favela residents had enough food for a week at most.

“People are worried about how to survive,” said CUFA founder Celso Athayde. The network of more than 400 favelas has distributed thousands of tons of food as well as soap donated by the public and major companies, he said.

But while 71% of favela residents do not believe social isolation should end, according to the study, many simply do not have the option to stop working.

“When you go to the gas station … it’s a favela resident who attends you,” Athayde said. “When you go to the supermarket, the cashier is a favela resident, the stockists, the cleaner, the security guard all live in favelas.”

President Jair Bolsonaro has attacked social isolation, ordered Brazilians back to work and mixed with people in Brasília, contradicting his own health minister, Luiz Mandetta, Brazil’s state governments and the World Health Organization.

“These conflicting messages send people back on to the street,” said Ricardo Fernandes, an actor from the Arteiros theatre group in Rio’s City of God (Cidade de Deus) favela. The group is part of the City of God Front (Frente CDD), which handed out 1,000 food parcels this week.

Food parcels in the City of God favela, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Nicoló Lanfranchi/The Guardian

The government’s lack of unity contrasts with the way different favela groups and organisations have come together. “People put aside any differences and rivalries,” Fernandes said.

Increasingly, people across Brazil are following Bolsonaro’s instructions as lockdown disintegrates. His commands were reinforced by evangelical pastors in the Coroadinho favela in São Luís in the north-east state of Maranhão.

Three residents were in home quarantine last week with suspected coronavirus, but people filled the streets and shops were open, said teacher Christiane Mendes. “Here we work the morning to eat in the afternoon. They can’t close,” she said of local stores.

Mendes is part of an education association delivering food and hygiene products to poorer residents, some of whom live in houses of wood and earth bricks without running water. She has not been able to register on the government app for the emergency payment, nor has anyone in her family.

“The crisis just threw light on what we already suffer, it intensified everything, the water, food problems, security,” she said. “It made the world really listen to the favela’s voice.”