La Bolsa Escuela en Brasil: Lecciones Para el Programa de Transferencia de Dinero Condicionado Alrededor del Mundo / The Brazilian Bolsa Escola: lessons for conditional cash transfer schemes around the world (june 2008)

ABSTRACT

The Bolsa Escola (‘school stipend’) and its successor the Bolsa Familia (‘family stipend’) schemes have formed a crucial and successful part of Brazil’s welfare program. Bolsa Escola provided aid to Brazil’s poorest families on the condition that their children attended school, and Bolsa Familia has extended this idea, giving aid on the condition that children both attend school and receive vaccinations. Bolsa Familia is currently the largest Conditional Cash Transfer Program (CCTP) in the world, costing roughly 0.5 of Brazilian GDP and helping around 11.2 million families (around 44 million Brazilians, constituting roughly one fifth of the population). Multilateral institutions have praised the schemes, and they are setting a leading example to other developing nations. In 2005, Paul Wolfowitz (former president of the World Bank) said, ‘Bolsa Familia has already become a highly praised model of effective social policy. Countries around the world are drawing lessons from Brazil’s experience and are trying to produce the same results for their own people’.This paper will ask whether such attempts to implement schemes like Bolsa Escola in other countries are likely to have sustainable success. In order to answer this question, we the authors will take broadly two approachesFirstly, we will focus specifically on Bolsa Escola in Brazil. We will ask which have been the most successful, and which have been the most problematic, parts of Bolsa Escola (and Bolsa Familia; although emphasis will be placed upon Bolsa Escola, since we will predominantly focus upon the role of CCTPs in the educational sector). In light of this analysis, we shall consider whether a Bolsa Escola-style scheme could feasibly be implemented in other countries; and if so, which particular aspects of the Bolsa Escola scheme should be emulated and which should be adapted or avoided.Secondly, we shall examine how other countries’ actual attempts to implement a Bolsa Escola-type scheme have fared…