Oportunidades

Oportunidades (English: Opportunities) (now rebranded as Prospera) is a government social assistance (welfare) program in Mexico founded in 2002, based on a previous program called Progresa, created in 1997. It is designed to target poverty by providing cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutrition support.Oportunidades is credited with decreasing poverty and improving health and educational attainment in regions where it has been deployed.

Key features of Oportunidades include:

Oportunidades has become a model for programs instituted in other countries, such as a pilot program in New York City, the Opportunity NYC, and the Social Protection Network in Nicaragua. Other countries that have instituted similar conditional cash transfer programs include Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Jamaica, Chile, Malawi and Zambia.

Progresa-Oportunidades is designed to be a centrally run program that relies on a horizontal integration of programs and services among the agencies and ministries in the executive branch. This required the establishment of a body with enough power to coordinate the participants in the program and monitor the budget. Instead of restructuring an old agency, it was decided to form a new agency with all of the appropriate powers and the backing from the president.

Although this provided for an easier and faster startup, it also meant that many of the related agency structures, which Progresa-Oportunidades would have to rely on for its sustainability, were incompatible with the new program. Officials in related structures such as the Ministry of Health and Education were not provided with the appropriate incentives to channel their work toward Progresa-Oportunidades. Many were individuals who had worked on earlier poverty programs and who now saw their resources shifting in a new direction. And officials often had more to gain politically from abandoning this program and starting a new one.

As a centrally administered program, Oportunidades allows for low operational costs and a greater level of efficiency in the transmission of benefits directly to the participants in the program. The program has sometimes been criticized for this completely “top down” approach. However, the lack of community participation in the identification of beneficiaries and the allocation of funding helps to limit the opportunities for corruption at the local level, which has traditionally been a problem with such government-funded programs.

...
Wikipedia