Gender, the World Bank, and conditional cash transfers in Latin America

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the mid-1990s, nearly all of the countries in Latin America have adopted a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. These critical programs – which have become the standard poverty reduction policy across the region – provide subsidies to poor mothers on the condition that they enroll their children in school and take them for health check-ups. The first and norm leader program, Mexico’s Progresa, included gender equality and empowerment of women as part of its original design goals. However, since Progresa, no Latin American CCT program has been designed with reduction of gender inequalities in mind. Feminist scholars have critiqued these programs as “maternalist.” What happened to the goals of gender equality along the way? This article sheds light on the World Bank’s involvement in weakening the gender equality goals that were an integral part of the original policy design. In redesigning CCT programs, the World Bank has sidelined these goals in two significant ways. First, policy entrepreneurs, committed to evidence-based policies, have omitted the female empowerment argument in response to mixed results on the matter of gender and CCTs. Second, gender experts (and gender knowledge) at the World Bank have been marginalized in favor of their economist and development expert colleagues.