Send Varied Conditional with airSlate SignNow

Send varied conditional

Conditional cash transfers have been a very successful anti-poverty program especially in Latin America. In Mexico, for instance, the government started a program in 1997 called Progresa later relabeled Oportunidades which quite simply means opportunities. The way it works is pretty simple. If the family sends a child to school, the family is paid some cash if the child continues to go to school. If a family regularly sends a child to healthcare clinics, the family is paid some cash and possibly also some in-kind aid such as nutritional supplements. The exact sums will vary with circumstances but imagine payments for child ranging between say 5 to 20 dollars a month. If your household is otherwise earning only, say, a few dollars a day, that's quite a considerable amount. In theoretical terms, you can think of these programs as being quite special in two ways. First, they target aid at the level of the individual household by using census data. And second, they are multisectoral, that is they address education, health, and nutrition all at once. The government tries to find out exactly who needs the aid and then to deliver it. This program is based on a lot of data at the individual family level. So, we do have a good sense of how well it's working and it seems it's working quite well indeed. For instance, the program really has led to improved school enrollment, especially for girls. At the same time, the program has limited child labour. You might think it's a problem that families earn less because the children are working less, but the transfers from the program more than make up for that difference. One study found that 26% of the cash transfer is invested by the families who receive it. After 18 months, due to those investments, agricultural income went up by almost 10%. That means the families have permanently higher standards of living due to these conditional cash transfers. Finally, the program has indeed brought better health and nutrition for the recipient children. The program can be thought of as a revolution in social policy. One aspect of the program that's not always remarked upon is simply how scientific an approach Mexico has taken to public policy not only implementing the program but tracking the results and fine-tuning it and improving it over time. Arguably, Mexico is, in this case, taking a more scientific approach to public policy than is often done in, say, the United States. The idea of conditional cash transfers is one which is spreading around the world, especially in Latin America including Chile, Colombia and especially Brazil. Studies also indicate it's done a good deal to lift people out of poverty in Brazil. This is a very well studied topic, as I mentioned, with excellent data and it's possible to test for various controls, say, by comparing families who receive the cash transfers with families who do not. For further reading, I would recommend that you google some of these terms.