Brazil Pays Parents to Help Poor Be Pupils, Not Wage Earners

[Michael Pollak <mpollak@xxxxxxxxx>]

[One cheer for Lula deparment]

January 3, 2004
The New York Times

Brazil Pays Parents to Help Poor Be Pupils, Not Wage Earners

   By CELIA W. DUGGER

   F ORTALEZA, Brazil Vandelson Andrade, 13, often used to skip school to
   work 12-hour days on the small, graceful fishing boats that sail from
   the picturesque harbor here. His meager earnings helped pay for rice
   and beans for his desperately poor family.

   But this year he qualified for a small monthly cash payment from the
   government that his mother receives on the condition that he shows up
   in the classroom.

   "I can't skip school anymore," said Vandelson, whose hand-me-down
   pants were so big that the crotch ended at his knees and the legs
   bunched up around his ankles. "If I miss one more day, my mother won't
   get the money."

   This year, Vandelson will finally pass the fourth grade on his third
   try a small victory in a new breed of social program that is spreading
   swiftly across Latin America. It is a developing-country version of
   American welfare reform: to break the cycle of poverty, the government
   gives the poor small cash payments in exchange for keeping their
   children in school and taking them for regular medical checkups.

   "I think these programs are as close as you can come to a magic bullet
   in development," said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for
   Global Development, a nonprofit research group in Washington. "They're
   creating an incentive for families to invest in their own children's
   futures. Every decade or so, we see something that can really make a
   difference, and this is one of those things."

   President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former factory worker who took
   office last January as a champion of the poor, is consolidating an
   array of cash transfer programs, sharply expanding his version of the
   model, named Family Grant, and tripling the average monthly benefit,
   to about $24.

   By 2006, Family Grant will reach 11.4 million families more than 45
   million people, about a quarter of Brazil's population. That would be
   by far the world's largest such program. Ana Fonseca, the director who
   reports directly to the president and his chief of staff called Family
   Grant the payment of "an old debt the country has to its poor
   citizens."

   Mr. da Silva's moves are popular with constituencies that include the
   poor a bedrock of his political base as well as the World Bank and the
   Inter-American Development Bank, big supporters of the model, which
   are putting up $3 billion in loans for the program. Its total cost
   over the president's four-year term will be close to $7 billion.

   Its annual cost about a third of 1 percent of Brazil's gross domestic
   product will be more than offset by savings Mr. da Silva's
   administration has squeezed out of the civil service pension system,
   said Joachim Von Amsberg, the World Bank's lead economist for Brazil.

   But the program has also won wide public acceptance here, surviving
   from government to government in large part because it is not simply a
   handout.

   Mr. da Silva's Workers' Party can claim credit for being among the
   first in the world to experiment with this model in the federal
   district of Brasília in 1995. "The idea was to pay the families to
   bring their children to school rather than put them to work," said
   Cristovam Buarque, an economist who was then Brasília's governor and
   is now Mr. da Silva's education minister.

   But it is equally telling that Mr. da Silva's political rival and
   predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, adopted the approach and
   turned it into a national program in 2001. His party had also tested
   the model in the city of Campinas in the mid-1990's.

   The spread of this approach across Latin America has been fueled by
   impressive results from a raft of studies in Nicaragua, Honduras and,
   most influentially, Mexico, whose program now reaches more than 20
   million people.

   The rigorous Mexico evaluation, conducted by the Washington-based
   International Food Policy Research Institute, found that the children
   who took part were healthier and better nourished and stayed in school
   longer than those in a control group.

   Poor Brazilians, in recent interviews, made clear that the bits of
   money that seem trivial by rich-country standards loom large for
   families living, as millions here do, on less than a dollar per person
   a day.

   From a sprawling favela built on the sand dunes of this seaside city
   by the poor from the parched rural interior, people said the
   government money paid for beans, rice, carrots, potatoes, eggs,
   mangoes, cooking oil, haircuts and school supplies.

   Children whose families get the grants say the fear of losing the
   money makes them more serious about school. Most still have jobs, too,
   but outside school hours.

   Carla dos Santos, 12, like Vandelson, is in fourth grade at the
   Fernando Cavalcante Mota School on Senator Robert Kennedy Street. But
   her face bears the weariness of someone several times her age.

   "She has suffered a lot," said her teacher, Maria das Mercês. "She
   takes care of her family. She has the responsibilities of an adult.
   She's trying so hard."

   For four hours every morning before school, Carla works as a maid,
   cooking, washing clothes and scrubbing floors for 30 cents an hour.
   She never splurges on treats. "I buy groceries rice, beans, spaghetti,
   chicken," she said earnestly.

   Then she goes to school, as she must for her family to get the grant.
   Several times she has fainted from hunger and stress, her teacher
   thinks. In the evening, Carla often cares for her brother and sister,
   ages 5 and 7, in the two small, windowless rooms they call home while
   her single mother, Elisebete dos Santos, goes to an aunt's to cook
   dinner in "a house full of lazy people who don't do anything," Carla
   said bitterly. Ms. dos Santos said she cooked for her relatives
   because they gave her food for her children.

   The family's biggest source of income is the government grant, which
   more than doubled two months ago, to $32. "It's a tremendous help for
   people without jobs," Ms. dos Santos said.

   Claudimir Portela, an impish 11-year-old with lush brown eyes and a
   thick fringe of lashes, lives a few blocks away. He would rather be
   anywhere but the classroom. He is happiest playing soccer on a scruffy
   lot in the favela, but he even prefers kneading dough at his job in a
   bakery that pays him in small change and loaves of bread.

   "My mother tells me, `You've got to stay in school or you'll be stupid
   and you'll never amount to anything,' " Claudimir said. But he did not
   seem impressed. It is not the long-term promise of a better life that
   keeps him in school, but his mother's threat that if he loses the $5 a
   month from the government, she will send him to live in the boring
   countryside with his father.

   "The fact that I have to go to school every day is a real pain," he
   said. "If it wasn't for the money, I'd stay on the street. I wouldn't
   come for even one day."

   A two-and-a-half-hour drive from Fortaleza, in the tiny, parched rural
   settlement of Quixába, the families eat what they grow often not
   enough and have virtually no opportunities to earn extra money. The
   land is rocky, the skies often devoid of rain. Even now, in Brazil's
   summer, the trees look like kindling. Brazil's drought-prone northeast
   has Latin America's largest concentration of rural poverty.

   Parents and teachers here say the children would go to school even
   without the grants. There is not much else to do. But the parents are
   still deeply grateful for the money.

   Those who have recently begun getting larger payments have no doubt
   about whom to credit: "First, I thank God," said Maria Andrade, an
   illiterate woman who for the first time was able to buy flip-flops for
   her barefoot children. "Second, I thank President Lula."

   In what has become a monthly ritual, the mothers go to Canindé, about
   30 miles away, to collect their payments. They swipe their
   government-issued electronic cash cards at the local lottery booth and
   out pops the money. Then they spend it at the market.

   Antônio Souza, 48, and Maria Torres, 37, are raising seven children in
   a mud hut a couple of hills away from Ms. Andrade. Every member of the
   family is sinewy and lean. The parents cannot remember the last time
   the family ate meat or vegetables. But their grant of $27 a month
   makes it possible to buy rice, sugar, pasta and oil.

   Mr. Souza and Ms. Torres, illiterate believers in the power of
   education, have always sent their children to school. "If they don't
   study, they'll turn into dummies like me," said their father, whose
   weathered, deeply creased face broke into a wide smile as he surveyed
   his bright-eyed daughters, Ana Paula, 11, and Daniele, 8, among them.
   "All I can do is work in the fields."

   His wife said proudly: "There are fathers who don't want their
   children to go to school. But this man here has done everything he
   could to send his children to school."

   Each weekday morning, a big flatbed truck jounces down the rutted dirt
   road that threads a path through Quixába, stopping at the scattered
   mud huts to collect children. The little girls' dresses hot pink, lime
   green, lemon yellow make splotches of color against the dun-colored
   landscape. The truck kicks up a billowing cloud of dust as it slowly
   chugs up and down the hills, carrying students to the country school.

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