Brazil’s Rousseff says extreme poverty almost eradicated

Anthony Boadle – Reuters, 02/19/2013

President Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday raised the monthly stipend of 2.5 million people living below the poverty line to make good on her promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Brazil, a nation with enormous income gaps between rich and poor.

She said she has almost met her anti-poverty target halfway through her four-year term, though Brazil’s last census points to 700,000 Brazilian families who still live in extreme poverty but are not registered on government social programs.

Success in the war on poverty would garner useful political capital for a possible re-election bid by Rousseff in 2014 and compensate on the welfare front for her failure to deliver strong economic growth.

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Brazil unveils social programme for low-income families

BBC News, 05/14/2012

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has launched a raft of social programmes for low-income families with young children.

Ms Rousseff said she would expand the popular social programme Bolsa Familia created by her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Families with children under six living in extreme poverty will get $35 (£22) a month for each family member.

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Brazil unveils social programme for low-income families

BBC, 05/14/2012.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has launched a raft of social programmes for low-income families with young children.

Ms Rousseff said she would expand the popular social programme Bolsa Familia created by her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Families with children under six living in extreme poverty will get $35 (£22) a month for each family member.

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Rousseff expands Brazil welfare benefits to target child poverty

Carla Simoes – Bloomberg, 05/14/2012

Brazil will increase benefits for the Bolsa Familia social welfare program by boosting payments to families with young children and expanding access to day care and health care, President Dilma Rousseff said in a radio and television address yesterday.

Each family below a certain income level will receive a minimum stipend from the government of 70 reais ($35) per month for each child aged 0 to 6, Rousseff said in a Mother Day’s speech broadcast yesterday evening.

The government will also increase access to day care and fight anemia, vitamin A deficiency and asthma by expanding health insurance, she said.

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Rousseff vows to eliminate extreme poverty in Brazil

EFE/Latin America Herald Tribune, 12/24/2011

LAHT

President Dilma Rousseff, who took office Jan. 1, says she remains committed to ridding Brazil of extreme poverty by the end of her term in 2013.

“We will not resist until we achieve our goal of pulling 16 million people out of destitution,” the head of state said Monday on her weekly radio program.

She said the “Brazil Without Destitution” initiative exceeded its targets for the first year, identifying 407,000 families who are eligible for public assistance but not receiving benefits.

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Does hunger battle have a hero in Graziano?

Bradley Brooks – AP/Bloomberg, 08/10/2011

When Altaiza Silva lost her job cleaning houses two years ago, she thought she would have to pull her daughters out of school and put them to work, likely perpetuating the cycle of poverty that’s claimed generations of her family.

Instead, their fall has been halted by Brazil’s widely admired social safety net, which includes the world’s biggest program giving money directly to poor households. With the help of that $8 billion national effort, Silva gets $65 a month. That is only about a fifth of what she earns in her new job as a hospital cleaner, but for desperately poor Brazilians, the extra cash from Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) program often means the difference between starvation and survival.

That same idea may now get a global tryout as world food prices spike, economies everywhere sputter and a horrific famine desolates East Africa.

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Brazil to boost spending on poor by 2.1 billion reis

Carla Simoes, Andre Soliani – Bloomberg, 03/01/2011

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff plans to hand out an extra 2.1 billion reais ($1.26 billion) to Brazil’s poorest families through the government’s “Bolsa Familia” welfare program.

The Bolsa Familia shows “our commitment to the sector of the Brazilian population that was always abandoned,” Rousseff said today in an event in Irece, a city in the northeastern state of Bahia.

The government will increase by as much as 45 percent its cash payments to families with children younger than 15 years old, the government said in an e-mailed statement. The average benefit to poor families will increase to 115 reais from 96 reais.

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To beat back poverty, pay the poor

Tina Rosenberg – The New York Times, 01/03/2011

Photo: Reuters

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium.  Parts of Brazil look like southern California.  Parts of it look like Haiti.  Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty.  But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world.

Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country.  Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians.  Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.

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Brazil’s cash transfer scheme is improving the lives of the poorest

Madeleine Bunting – The Guardian, 11/19/2010

Rumour has it that when senior civil servants at the Department for International Development (DfID) tried to interest the development secretary Andrew Mitchell in cash transfers, they couldn’t get anywhere. One morning he came across a column by my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty and was converted.

Within a short space of time the “must read” book for senior DfID officials was Just Give Money to the Poor, which charted the success of projects all over the world where aid was given straight to the poorest people – without all the consultants on fat salaries to analyse poverty reduction.

He’s delighted by the interest. “Brazil is developing a new model of donor whereby we give expertise as well as aid. Brazil is already one of the largest donors of food aid in the world.” He is also struck by the paradox that Brazil is expanding its welfare state just as Europe is cutting back on welfare.

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Brazil’s Bolsa Família: How to get children out of jobs and into school

The Economist, 07/29/2010

THREE generations of the Teixeira family live in three tiny rooms in Eldorado, one of the poorest favelas (slums) of Greater São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas. The matriarch of the family, Maria, has six children; her eldest daughter, Marina, has a toddler and a baby. Like many other households in thefavela, the family has been plagued by domestic violence. But a few years ago, helped in part by Bolsa Família (family grant)—which pays mothers a small sum so long as their children stay in education and get medical check-ups—Maria took her children out of child labour and sent them to school.

The programme allows the children to miss about 15% of classes. But if a child gets caught missing more than that, payment is suspended for the whole family. The Teixeiras’ grant has been suspended and restarted several times as boy after boy skipped classes. And now the eldest, João, aged 16, is out earning a bit of money by cleaning cars or distributing leaflets, taking his younger brothers with him. Marina’s pregnancies have added to the pressure. She gets no money for her children because she lives with her mother and the family has reached Bolsa Família’s upper limit. After rallying for a while, the Teixeira family is sliding backwards, struggling more than it did a couple of years ago.

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