A New Approach to Social Assistance: Latin America’s Experience with Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

By Laura B. Rawlings. 2004

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance, that represents an innovative, and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families, contingent upon certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school, or bringing them to health centers on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short-term income support objectives, as well as to promote the longer-term accumulation of human capital, by serving as a demand-side complement to the supply of health, and education services. Evaluation results from a first generation of programs reveal that this innovative design has been quite successful in addressing many of the criticisms of social assistance, such as poor poverty targeting, disincentive effects, and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from programs in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in increasing enrollment rates, improving preventive health care and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about conditional cash transfer programs, including the replicability of their success under different conditions, their role within a broader social protection system, and their long-term effectiveness in preventing the inter- generational transmission of poverty. One of the main challenges facing policymakers today is how to build off of the established success of conditional cash transfer programs, to tackle the more difficult issues of improving the quality of health, and education services, and providing a more holistic approach to both social protection, and chronic poverty.

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Dropping Out: Why are Students Leaving Junior High in China's Poor Rural Areas? (2012, unknown): “This could come in the form of a conditional cash transfer, as has been used with general success in many Latin American countries (Attanasio et al., 2006; Rawlings, 2004; Rawlings and Rubio, 2005).”
For Protection and Promotion: The Design and Implementation of Effective Safety Nets (2008, background): “…Government of Mexico (2007); Handa and Davis (2006); Levy (2006); Lindert (2005b); Lindert, Skoufi as, and Shapiro (2006); Morley and Coady (2003); Rawlings (2005); Rawlings and Rubio (2005); Schultz (2004); Skoufi as (2001); World Bank (2003j, 2005b); www.oportunidades.gob.mx/ Nicaragua: Red…”
Education choices in Mexico: using a structural model and a randomised experiment to evaluate Progresa (2004, background): “Rawlings (2004) contains a survey of some of these programs. Skoufias (2001) provides additional details on PROGRESA and its evaluation.”
From Structural Adjustment to Social Adjustment (2008, result): “The Red de Protección Social (RPS) – has been cited as one of the most successful CCTs (Rawlings, 2004) and while the RPS is more expensive than Oportunidades to implement, it has been suggested that the results have been even more impressive (Maluccio and Flores, 2004: 65).”
The Experience of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean (2006, unknown): “See Ilahi et al. (2000), Rawlings (2004) and Rawlings (2005) for more general discussions of CCT programmes in Latin America.”
Examining Conditional Cash Transfer Programs : A Role for Increased Social Inclusion? (2006, background): “In these countries, CCTs often began as programs for 2 This section draws largely on Rawlings, 2005.”
The Unpaid Care Work–Paid Work Connection (2008, background): “Cases in point are the Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Oportunidades (formerly PROGRESA) in Mexico, but similar programs abound in other countries including Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkey (Rawlings, 2005).”