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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2005 
Mexico's Poor Get Cash Benefits Tied to Education, Health Care
 Hugh Dellios
Tezoquipan, Mexico - They have no running water in their cinderblock home. There is no chair to rest on. The family's income is mostly from tamales, which the mother makes and sells to neighbors for a dime profit each.
Celia Rojo, Manuel Mejia and their four children are the portrait of extreme poverty in Latin America. They may also be on the leading edge of efforts to combat it, according to the World Bank and others.
Rojo receives $15 each month from the Mexican government, as long as she continues visiting the health clinic, and $36 each month as long as she keeps her 13-year-old daughter and 7-year-old twins in school. She would receive more, but her 17-year-old son dropped out.
The Mejia family reflects the successes and challenges of Opportunities, Mexico's $3 billion a year attempt to deal with the chronic poverty that plagues the region. At a time when parts of Latin America are suffering from instability and disillusionment with the free market and democratic systems, officials from Colombia and other nations have gone to Mexico to examine whether its anti-poverty program could help their struggling poor.
World Bank analysts and others cautiously praise Mexico's program, which puts cash "scholarships" in the hands of the neediest families if they comply with certain health and education requirements aimed at helping their children break the cycle of poverty that trapped their parents and grandparents.
The program began in 1997 but has been expanded by President Vicente Fox. While the president credits the program with lowering Mexico's poverty rate, others say the true impact will be judged over a longer term. But so far, there have been positive results in school attendance rates and health statistics, according to Mexican officials and independent researchers.
The program's directors say there also is evidence it is empowering women with their own cash, encouraging young women to start families later and at least delaying the migration of some young men to the United States.
"We are breaking the old tendencies," said Rogelio Gomez Hermosillo, the program's national coordinator. "People say this isn't worth it because it's not producing jobs, but my focus is the opposite. If we don't make the investment, children from these extremely poor homes will never connect with the jobs we are creating."
Not all are so optimistic. Some say Mexico's poverty is still too high for the nation to be celebrating any success in combating it, especially in the neglected indigenous communities. The World Bank figures say the country's extreme poverty rate fell by 17 percentage points to 20 percent between 1996 and 2002. The moderate poverty rate went from 53.7 percent to 51.7 percent. Newer figures are due in the next few weeks
Many critics assert that any drop in Mexico's poverty rate has more to do with the cash sent home from fathers and sons who have left to work in the United States. Last year, Mexico received more than $16 billion in such remittances.
Others say the program has not been as effective in reaching the country's most remote, conflicted and backward communities, and that it may be only a Band-Aid on inequalities inherent in the free-market system.
"It is a model that has promise, but just because it seems to work reasonably well in Mexico doesn't mean it will work in Colombia, Nicaragua or Bangladesh," said Jere Behrman, an economist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied Mexico's program for eight years.
What Behrman praised most is that the government has tried to separate the program from old patronage methods in which cash was handed out in exchange for votes. He said the government also has made a sincere effort to regularly evaluate and improve the program.
"These programs are often tied to politics, and leaders are happy not to have them evaluated," he said. "But the designers of this program very much wanted to break out of this mold."
The program started under former President Ernesto Zedillo. And the original designers borrowed the "scholarship" concept from a Brazilian program and pioneered a coordinated approach to poverty among various government ministries.
Recipients are identified through an exhaustive technical screening process, which also broke with looser, more politically tainted methods of the past.
Under Fox, the originally rural-based program was expanded into urban areas. Now it benefits about 25 million people, or a quarter of Mexico's population, and officials say their current focus is in correcting faults in the screening process.
Gomez, the program coordinator, said Fox, when the conservative governor of Guanajuato state, was a vocal skeptic of the cash handouts. Once elected president in 2000, he embraced the program as part of his plan to combat the country's high dropout rate.
Families can earn up to $162 a month, which is sometimes 70 percent of their income. The Fox government added a third program in 2003 to keep older youths in high school by offering them $300 savings accounts.
Studies point to a 35 percent rise in clinic visits in rural areas, a 17 percent increase in use of family planning methods and a 22 percent increase in children's food consumption. Others cite evidence of a reduction in student sick-days, an improvement in children's motor skills and a drop in malnutrition.
Two hours north of Mexico City, the semidesert of western Hidalgo state is one of the pockets of Mexico with too few resources to take advantage of free-market policies that brought wealth to other swaths of Mexico. Some villages are virtually free of men, who have gone north to the U.S.
Opportunities now delivers benefits to 198,000 families here, or 44 percent of the state's population. The number of families getting aid has doubled since Fox took office, officials say.
In shawls, straw hats and dusty dress shoes, hundreds of women lining up for payday in the town of Cardonal last month told of how they now can buy a carton of milk or school clothes for the children. Others recite the simple sanitation lessons learned at regular clinic visits.
In the nearby village of El Botho, Angel Roque Cerroblanco, a school official, estimated that attendance would be down 25 percent if not for the in-class requirement. Now, he said, parents have to think twice before yanking a child out of school to tend the goats.
Cash in hand, Anna Maria Ambrosio, 54, returned to her village to show a reporter both the need for the program and its limits: The walls of her home are cactus plants she and her husband planted in a square near their goat pen. Their roof is a tarp and a scrap of aluminum.
Ambrosio receives $15 each month from the government. With a middle-school-age son, she could receive more, but the boy dropped out of school and snuck into Florida with a relative.
"Thanks to God, my son is working on the other side, but he only just got there so how can he send money yet? He's only 14," Ambrosio said.
At the Mejia house in Tezoquipan, Rojo explained the benefit money wasn't enough to keep her 17-year-old son from dropping out, but she has higher hopes for the twins, Leandro and Manolo.
Up the road, a relative, Paulina Chavez Garcia, 46, said the program has brightened her two teenage daughters' prospects since she started receiving the grants last year. The oldest girl, Berenice, 16, is not only still in high school - rare for girls in rural Mexico - but wants to study information technology, perhaps even in college.
"The only thing I can give them is studies," the mother said. "We're ignorant, but they aren't." |
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