Thursday 15 January 2015

An anti-poverty scheme invented in Latin America is winning converts worldwide

Brazil's Bolsa Família (“Family Fund”) anti-poverty scheme, the largest of its kind in the world. [...] Brazilian officials were in Cairo this week to help Egyptian officials set up a similar scheme. “Governments all over the world are looking at this programme,” says Kathy Lindert of the World Bank's office in Brasília, who is about to begin work on similar schemes for Eastern Europe. Bolsa Família works as follows. Where a family earns less than 120 reais ($68) per head per month, mothers are paid a benefit of up to 95 reais on condition that their children go to school and take part in government vaccination programmes. Municipal governments do much of the collection of data on eligibility and compliance, but payments are made by the federal government. Each beneficiary receives a debit card which is charged up every month, unless the recipient has not met the necessary conditions, in which case (and after a couple of warnings) the payment is suspended. Some 11m families now receive the benefit, equivalent to a quarter of Brazil's population.

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