The Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) was launched in the 1990s to improve the well-being of Mexico’s poorest people. It targets 2.6 million families – one in nine Mexican families – and combines health, education and nutrition projects. As similar programmes are being implemented elsewhere, lessons can be learned from evaluation of Mexico’s programme.

Projects specific to sectors, by ignoring the overall picture of poverty, risk failure. Children who are sick are unlikely to attend school, for example. The designers of PROGRESA recognised that addressing different dimensions of human development simultaneously has greater social benefits than focusing on individual sectors.

PROGRESA, launched in Mexico in the 1990s, includes initiatives such as cash transfers to mothers if they visit health centres and ensure their children go to school. Higher transfers are provided to keep secondary school girls in school. Cash transfers and nutritional supplements are supplied to young children and pregnant and breastfeeding women only after health authorities confirm beneficiaries have been to public clinics. A report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) summarises a series of evaluation reports of PROGRESA.

In Mexico, as in most developing countries, few national poverty alleviation programmes have been rigorously evaluated. However, impact measurement was built into PROGRESA’s design. In contrast with previous schemes, which were manipulated by local political elites, PROGRESA’s politically neutral implementation and evaluation meant that the succeeding  government supported its continuation.

IFPRI data show that PROGRESA has:

• achieved an 85 percent school attendance rate in beneficiary families, with 20 percent more girls enrolled in secondary school
• improved nutrition and preventive health care, thereby making younger children better able to withstand illness and less likely to suffer from child stunting
• allowed participant households to spend more on fruit, vegetables, meat and other animal products
• reduced administrative costs to 8.9 percent, low compared to previous schemes, freeing up resources for other parts of the programme
• avoided mistakes of previous poverty alleviation programmes – such as subsidies for the Mexican staple tortilla – which were expensive to run and had a negligible effect on poverty as non-poor groups benefited.

Evaluation of programmes such as PROGRESA can increase the accountability of governments towards their citizens by providing a template for assessing whether public funds are used effectively in poverty alleviation. PROGRESA has set higher standards for the design and conduct of social policy in Mexico and in Latin America in general.

Key recommendations for future programmes include:

• in poor rural communities, including all residents in programmes instead of discriminating among households, which may lead to social divisions
• realising that school attendance is not enough if it is irregular, and that attention needs to be paid to the quality of education
• preparing for more intensive use of the facilities (e.g. health) following the implementation of programmes, by strengthening the supply of these facilities
• continually asking questions appropriate to the programmes and their beneficiaries concerning, for example, the most effective kinds of cash transfers, and whether integrating different sectors helps or not
• involving researchers early in the design and evaluation of programmes
• arrangements to follow the life cycles of children in the programmes to see if they actually break out of poverty in the long term, and if transmission of poverty from generation to generation ends.

Source(s):
‘PROGRESA and its impacts on the welfare of rural households in Mexico’, International Food Policy Research Institute, Research Report 139, by Emmanuel Skoufias, 2005 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 31 January 2006

Further Information:
Emmanuel Skoufias
The World Bank
LCSPP (I8-113)
1818 H Street NW
Washington DC 20433-USA

Tel: +1 202 4587539
Fax: +1 202 5220054
Contact the contributor: eskoufias@worldbank.org

The World Bank

Other related links:
'Cash transfers can reduce childhood poverty'

'Non-contributory pensions – costly luxury or weapon against poverty?'

'Can health vouchers help vulnerable groups?'

'New vulnerabilities in South Asia: time for new safety nets?'

Making Cash Count, IDS Report (pdf)