Brazil to expand anti-poverty measures

Blog do Planalto

The Brazilian government announced this week that it plans to expand the program Brazil Without Poverty (Brasil sem Miseria) to provide benefits to about 2.5 million families. The program, launched in June of last year, is a key part of president Dilma Rousseff's initiative to lift millions out of poverty and builds on popular programs begun under Lula's Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) campaign.

Currently, about half of the rural Brazilian population--about 15 percent of the total population--lives in poverty, while around 16 million (eight percent) live in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than about US$44 per day. Poverty in the country is particularly concentrated in the "semi-arid" northeast of the country, where a despite decade of impressive national growth, conditional cash transfers, and other development efforts, much of the population is extremely poor. As a result, Dilma's Brazil Without Poverty program seeks to fill in the gaps left by the popular Bolsa Familia or the Program for the Acquisition of Food, a well-functioning local agriculture development program that has helped bolster the production and sustainability of local agriculture, rather than simply alleviating the ravages of poverty and hunger.

President Rousseff's goal is to reach all 16 million living in extreme poverty.

One of the ways in which this program fills in these gaps is by actively seeking and registering families who are eligible, but have not yet participated in one of several other development schemes:

Active Search (Busca Ativa) is the strategy adopted by Brasil Sem Miseria to find and register all extremely poor families that have not been located yet. Developed in the municipal level, it is implemented by social assistance mobile teams and by the increase in the transfers of Federal Government resources to city governments. Thanks to Busca Ativa, 687 thousand families previously “invisible” were included in the Cadastro Único in its first year of existence, and are already receiving the Bolsa Família and other social benefits.

The government claims it has already lifted around 22 million people out of poverty over the past decade (while it is difficult to distinguish the particular effects of various specific projects from the effects of overall robust national economic growth throughout the period, most scholars who look at Brazil's progress agree that active anti-poverty programming deserves a significant amount of credit).

While the reach and cost of Brazil's development portfolio is impressive (this new expansion will bring targeted social spending via Bolsa Familia to about US$12 billion), its biggest downfalls so far seem to be in providing the infrastructure or follow-through for recipients who receive benefits. For example, with the Bolsa Familia program, evaluators frequently find that where recipients are required to receive medical checkups (especially pregnant women and young children) the clinics that serve the area are often inaccessible and/or under equipped. And, while benefits make it easier to send children to school more regularly, the schools serving poor rural areas in Brazil are often inadequate. Finally, the sheer number of poor Brazilians--urban and rural--make coverage a real challenge; some qualified families are simply left out.