As the largest conditional cash transfer in the developing world, the BFP has attracted significant attention both in Brazil and beyond. As such, this paper has two key audiences – and two corresponding objectives.
First, the primary audience is international, given world-wide interest in the Bolsa Família Program. This international target audience thus includes: policy makers, practitioners, and potential future practitioners of CCTs working in other countries who are interested in learning more abut Brazil’s experience with the BFP, particularly given its decentralized context. For this audience, the paper highlights some of the key features of the program including:
• The program as a reform program, which consolidated four pre-reform programs into one, building on Brazil’s decade of experience with CCTs;
• The size and rapid expansion of the program, now reaching 11.1 million families (over 46 million people), making it the largest program of this type in the world;
• The very impressive targeting accuracy of the program, and the recently demonstrated impacts on reducing poverty and inequality;
• The implementation of the BFP in Brazil’s decentralized context and the development and use of innovative performance-based management mechanisms to promote incentives for quality implementation in this context so as to overcome the “principal-agent” dilemma;
• The role of the BFP as a unifying force in social policy, integrating social policy both horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of government; and
• The “natural laboratory for innovation” that has emerged in Brazil’s decentralized context, for experimenting with exit policies and graduation approaches.
Second, the topic is clearly of interest to audiences in Brazil. As such, the paper seeks to document the evolution of the design and implementation of the BFP under the first Lula Administration, taking stock of the main advances and highlighting key priorities for the future, including:
• Priority actions for further strengthening of the “basic architecture” of the program: strengthening conditionalities monitoring, fine-tuning targeting, expanding coverage to reduce errors of exclusion, and enhancing oversight and controls; and
• Possible innovations for the graduation agenda, including: (a) enhancing educational conditionalities (via bonuses for grade completion and graduation and incentives for older children to attend school); and (b) linking BFP beneficiaries to complementary services.
©Social Protection/The World Bank
Website: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLACREGTOPLABSOCPRO/Resources/BRBolsaFamiliaDiscussionPaper.pdf