Oportunidades

"Prospera" redirects here. For the private charter city in Honduras, see Próspera.

Oportunidades (English: Opportunities; later rebranded as Prospera and more recently as Bienestar) is a government social assistance program in Mexico founded in 2002, based on a previous program called Solidaridad, created in 1988 and renamed Progresa in 1997.[1] It is designed to target poverty by providing cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutrition support.[2] Oportunidades is credited with decreasing poverty and improving health and educational attainment in regions where it has been deployed.[3] Key features of Oportunidades include:

  • Conditional cash transfer (CCT): To encourage co-responsibility, receipt of aid is dependent on family compliance with program requirements, such as ensuring children attend school and family members receive preventative health care.[4]
  • "Rights holders": Program recipients are mothers, the caregiver directly responsible for children and family health decisions.[5]
  • Cash payments are made from the government directly to families to decrease overhead and corruption.[1]
  • A system of evaluation and statistical controls to ensure effectiveness.[2]
  • Rigorous selection of recipients based on geographic and socioeconomic factors.
  • Program requirements target measures considered most likely to lift families out of poverty, focusing on health, nutrition and children's education.[1]

Oportunidades championed the conditional cash transfer (CCT) model for programs instituted in other countries, such as a pilot program in New York City, the Opportunity NYC,[1] 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.[4]

  1. ^ a b c d Paying for Better Parenting, New York Times, Accessed 12/07/06
  2. ^ a b Mexico's Oportunidades Program Accessed 12/07/06
  3. ^ Bulletin of the World Health Organization - Reaching Mexico's poorest Accessed 12/07/06
  4. ^ a b Lessons offered by Latin American cash transfer programmes, Mexico’s Oportunidades and Nicaragua's SPN. Implications for African countries Archived 2009-05-20 at the Wayback Machine Accessed 12/07/06
  5. ^ SEDESOL - Oportunidades Accessed 12/07/06 Archived 2006-12-09 at the Wayback Machine