Gender, The World Bank and Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America
By: Nora Nagels (she, her, hers)
Since the mid-1990s, nearly all Latin American countries have adopted a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. These provide subsidies to poor mothers on the condition that they send their children to school and for health checkups. Policy analysts and experts have found them to be effective in achieving certain social development objectives such as in education, health and poverty alleviation. Created in a development community increasingly concerned with issues specifically related to “women in poverty”, the first and norm leader CCT program in Mexico, Progresa (1997), included the goals of gender equality and the empowerment of women in its original design. Progresa endorsed a “gender approach” supporting women “so they could acquire real possibilities for equality (oportunidades auténticamente igualitarias)”. Progresa’s gender approach was implemented in two ways. First, the program allocated a cash incentive for girls to attend school larger than that for boys. Second, mothers, rather than fathers, received the cash to alter intra-household relations and to promote gender equality.
The World Bank has transformed the first Mexican as well as the Brazilian CCTs into a “standard model”. However, having been standardized by the World Bank and propagated throughout other Latin American countries, CCT programs are no longer oriented at transforming gender norms and promoting gender equality. After Progresa, no Latin American CCT program has been designed to reduce gender inequalities and empower women. Feminist scholars, here, here and here, have critiqued these programs as “maternalist” because they reproduce the traditional sexual division of labor.
What happened to the goals of gender equality along the way?
Various factors might explain the weakening of the gender equality goals that were part of the original policy design; for example, as shown in my article , in countries where CCTs were implemented, certain discriminatory gender social norms have challenged those gender equality goals that were a priority in CCT adoption. But, this paper sheds light on the World Bank’s involvement in weakening the gender equality goals that were an integral part of the original policy design. The standardized model promoted by the World Bank minimize gender equality goals due in part to a “measurement obsession” that found measuring gender inequality simply too difficult.
In standardizing the CCTs, the Bank has undermined gender equality goals in two significant ways. First, policy entrepreneurs, with a seemingly unwavering commitment to evidence-based policies, omitted the gender argument in response to mixed results on the matter of CCTs and reducing gender inequalities by empowering women. Second, gender experts – and the gender knowledge they possess – within the Bank have been marginalized in favor of their economist and development expert colleagues. This article illustrates that quantitative and economic forms of knowledge are privileged at the World Bank, while qualitative and contextual knowledge – in this case in particular, feminist and gender-related research ‒ are marginalized. Quantitative knowledge with its inherent logic of simplification for comparison’s sake could not easily address the complex, fluid, intersectional, historical and very context specific gender relations. Therefore, the World Bank’s “measurement obsession” leads to a “one size fits all” approach: CCTs that fail to account for gender inequalities.
My article documents the role of the World Bank in minimizing gender equality in CCTs through an analysis of official documents produced in large part by the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Inter-American Bank of Development (IADB) in the early 2000s, as well as through interviews with experts.
The principal argument stresses the missed opportunity for the World Bank to mainstream gender in its best instrument to fight poverty, the CCTs.
Read the full article here: Gender, the World Bank, and conditional cash transfers in Latin America
Nora Nagels (she, her, hers) is an Assistant professor in political science at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. Dr. Nora Nagel's research is concerned with gender, citizenship and social policies as well as indigenous politics in Latin America. She has recently published on comparative politics, conditional cash transfers, development, citizenship and gender in leading journals such as Social Politics; Social Policy & Administration; Social Policy & Society, Revue internationale de politique comparée and Lien social et Politiques.
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