On 29 October 2020 the World Bank's board approved a US$1 billion loan to Brazil to expand Bolsa Família, the country's flagship programme of cash payments to poor families, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What Bolsa Família is
Launched in 2003, Bolsa Família pays monthly benefits to low-income families, usually to the mother. Payments are conditional: families are expected to keep children in school and up to date with vaccinations and health checks. It became one of the most studied social programmes in the world and a model for conditional cash transfers elsewhere. Before the pandemic, about 13 million families were enrolled.
The 2020 loan
The loan, from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and guaranteed by Brazil, financed a project called "Income Support for the Poor affected by COVID-19". According to the World Bank, it aimed to:
- add at least 1.2 million poor families to the programme;
- reach at least 3 million people, including about 990,000 children and young people and around 7,000 indigenous people;
- support evaluation of the programme's emergency response.
Women made up about 90% of direct recipients. Brazil's unemployment rate had reached 13.6% in August 2020. The programme's conditions, such as school attendance, were temporarily suspended during the pandemic and were to resume afterwards.
What happened next
In late 2021 the government of President Jair Bolsonaro replaced Bolsa Família with a new programme, Auxílio Brasil, with higher payments. After Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in 2023, the Bolsa Família name and its conditions were restored with a revised benefit structure.
Why it matters
Cash-transfer programmes raise questions of justice in a broad sense: who the state helps, on what conditions, and how fairly the money is distributed. Evaluations have generally found that Bolsa Família reduced extreme poverty at relatively low cost, while critics have debated the conditions and the risk of political use of benefits.