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.Paying for Better Parenting, New York Times, Accessed 12/07/06 It is designed to target poverty by providing cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutrition support.Mexico's Oportunidades Program Accessed 12/07/06 Oportunidades is credited with decreasing poverty and improving health and educational attainment in regions where it has been deployed.Bulletin of the World Health Organization - Reaching Mexico's poorest Accessed 12/07/06 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.Lessons offered by Latin American cash transfer programmes, Mexico’s Oportunidades and Nicaragua's SPN. Implications for African countries Accessed 12/07/06 "Rights holders": Program recipients are mothers, the caregiver directly responsible for children and family health decisions.SEDESOL - Oportunidades Accessed 12/07/06 Cash payments are made from the government directly to families to decrease overhead and corruption. A system of evaluation and statistical controls to ensure effectiveness. 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.
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, 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.
Administration 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.Levy, S. (2006): Progress Against Poverty: Sustaining Mexico's Progresa-Oportunidades Program, Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press. 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.
Information strategies To effectively disseminate information about the program, Progresa-Oportunidades pursued a three-pronged strategy. First, an extensive amount of information was made generally available through the Internet. Secondly, information was provided to Congress and other government officials at all levels in the form of detailed budget proposals, program evaluations, and other relevant documents. Finally, public relations campaigns were initially minimal to avoid raised expectations. However, since 2006, the public profile of the program has been raised, particularly through extensive radio and television advertisements.
Transparency and accountability Traditionally, most anti-poverty programs in Mexico have relied on presidential support to establish their funding and public profile. Although Oportunidades originally was no different in its dependence on Zedillo to support its startup costs, much effort has since been made to establish an image of Progresa-Oportunidades as independent of the president and national party politics, in order to heighten the chances that it would survive transfers of power in the executive branch. Several congressional provisions have helped to ensure this identity.
Among these are several provisions that prevent the program being used for political proselytizing. In 2000 and 2003, program officials were prohibited from signing up new beneficiaries within six months of national elections to prevent vote buying. In addition, budget provisions have been enacted that attempt to directly communicate with beneficiaries to educate them about rights and responsibilities regarding the program.
Under political transitions The transition between the Zedillo and Fox administrations was a crucial test of the long-term sustainability of Progresa-Oportunidades. President Fox's administration achieved early public recognition for its commitment to anti-poverty strategies as well as its willingness to continue with earlier initiatives that had proved to be successful. Fox ultimately decided to continue with the program because its independent image meant that it had not become identified with the old ruling party (the PRI) or with former President Zedillo in the eyes of the public. Additionally, Fox had received confirmation of the program's benefits from the program's own impact evaluations and outside international financial institutions who held Oportunidades in high esteem and hoped to see it continue.
Effectiveness Oportunidades has been hailed as a success by many in Mexico and globally. The first round of evaluations were carried out by the prestigious International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), between 1997 and 2000. The #IFPRI-Progresa partnership played a large role in shaping Mexican social policy and in bringing the randomized controlled trial (RCT) to the forefront of policy evaluation worldwide.
Since 2002, the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Public Health Institute, INSP) and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, CIESAS) have been responsible for carrying out ongoing evaluations of both program operations and impact. The Oportunidades evaluation website contains a relatively comprehensive listing of the documents and databases produced during all of the evaluation rounds.
IFPRI-Progresa
Communications between IFPRI and Progresa's leadership commenced in late 1997,Jere Behrman, "Policy-Oriented Research Impact Assessment (PORIA) Case Study on the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Mexican PROGRESA Anti-Poverty and Human Resource Investment Conditional Cash Transfer Program," IFPRI (2007), p. 19-20. with the final contract ($2.5 million USD)Susan W. Parker and Graciela Teruel. “Randomization and Social Program Evaluation: The Case of Progresa.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 599, no. 1 (May 1, 2005): 210. signed during the third quarter of 1998.Jere Behrman, “Policy-Oriented Research Impact Assessment (PORIA) Case Study,” 38 The IFPRI-Progresa research team's overall objective was to "determine if Progresa was functioning in practice as it [was] intended to by design."Emmanuel Skoufias, Is PROGRESA Working? Summary of the Results of an Evaluation by IFPRI, (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2000), 9. The evaluation was divided between 'operational' evaluation (is the program being carried out according to the design?) and 'impact' evaluation (is the program having the intended effect on the target population?). Without discounting the importance of the operational evaluation, the data focuses exclusively on impact evaluation, which received far greater attention and had a much broader audience. The impact evaluation involved the production of far more technical documents, reports, and later, published journal articles and books.
The results of IFPRI's initial evaluations began to form into reports in late 1999 and early 2000; most final reports (18 in total) were submitted before the end of 2000, with the executive synthesis report published on September 1 that year. The thematic core of the IFPRI evaluations conformed to the three program components: health, education, and nutrition.Greenspun, “Assessing Mexico’s Anti-Poverty Program ‘Oportunidades’: Combining and Comparing Objective and interview-Based Indicators,” Tulane University, 2011, 23. In these areas, Progresa increased school enrollment,T. Paul Schultz, Final Report on the Impact of PROGRESA on School Enrollment. Evaluation (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2000), 34-36. lowered incidence of disease in children,Paul Gertler, Final Report: The Impact of PROGRESA on Health (Washington, DC: IFPPRI, 2000), 14. and increased growth for young children receiving nutritional supplements.Jere R. Behrman and John Hoddinott, An Evaluation of the Impact of PROGRESA on Pre-School Child Height (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2000), 20. In sum "in the central impact areas...the results [were] encouraging."Emannuel Skoufias, Is Progresa Working? (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2000), 4.
Methodology
According to the bulk of literature describing IFPRI-Progresa, the project was the first large-scale social policy evaluation implemented in a ‘developing’ country context to use randomized controlled trial (RCT) research design. In the perennial debates surrounding the RCT as a tool of social policy evaluation IFPRI-Progresa provided (and continues to provide) an important proof-of-concept, an example exalted by proponents and held aloft before critics.
Sampling design
Original sample selection took place in mid-1997."IFPRI’s active involvement in the evaluation of Progresa started in July 1998, more than one year after the selection of the evaluation sample by PROGRESA authorities.” Emmanuel Skoufias, PROGRESA and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico, (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2005), 28 (footnote 30). All available information indicates that personnel at Secretaría de Desarrollo Social, Mexico undertook and directed the process before the arrival of most of the IFPRI research team.
One of the most detailed accounts is as follows: