EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Family Stipends to Keep 10.7 Million Children in School

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 13 2001 (IPS) - The Brazilian government plans to extend a bonus system aimed at keeping children in school to 10.7 million six to 15-year-olds this year, in order to reduce child labour and make basic schooling universal, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso announced Tuesday.

Brazil’s national school bonus programme, modelled on the success of a project that began to be implemented in the capital, Brasilia, in 1996, provides a monthly stipend to poor families who keep their kids in school.

The Education Ministry’s programme pays 15 reals (7.60 dollars) per child, up to a maximum of three, to families with monthly incomes of up to 38 dollars, or half a minimum salary, per person.

In order for the families to receive the stipend, the children must attend class at least 85 percent of the time. Attendance is reviewed on a quarterly basis.

Municipal governments are in charge of selecting the students whose families are to receive the stipends, and are free to complement the aid with local funds. Some city governments have even designed similar programmes of their own.

Cardoso estimated that around 10.7 million school-age children would benefit from the programme this year – which means a nearly sevenfold expansion of the national programme that began to be implemented in 1998, and which offered stipends last year to 855,217 families for keeping 1.68 million minors in school.

The expansion of the programme, which will go even beyond Cardoso’s 1998 campaign pledge, was made possible by the creation this year of a national fund for combatting poverty, an initiative sponsored by Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, who presides over the Senate until Wednesday.

The fund against poverty multiplied the financial resources earmarked annually to the school bonus programme by a factor of 10, to a total of 1.7 billion reals (855 million dollars), making it the mainstay of the government’s fight against poverty and social inequality.

The stipends, which were limited to the country’s poorest municipalities until last year, will be extended in March to any town or city that signs up for the programme, said Education Minister Paulo Renato Souza.

Sao Paulo Mayor Marta Suplicy applauded the news, especially since her request to extend the school-bonus programme to her city, the richest and most populous in this country of 168 million, was rejected last January by Souza himself.

Although Sao Paulo, a city of 10 million, accounts for a large share of Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product, millions of its inhabitants live in extreme poverty in the slums that ring the metro area.

The school bonus programme is considered one of the most successful poverty-reduction initiatives, which offers immediate as well as long-term effects, while fighting the problem of child labour as well.

Brazil’s experience was recommended to other countries in the region at the last Ibero-American Summit, held in Panama late last year. Mexico and other countries in Latin America have adopted the model, as have several African nations.

Former governor of Brasilia Cristovam Buarque is the driving force behind the expansion of the programme, for which he created the non-governmental organisation “Misión Crianza” (or Mission Child).

In his weekly radio programme Tuesday, Cardoso recalled that pilot programmes paying bonuses to poor families to keep their children in school began to be developed in 1995, in Campinas, a city near Sao Paulo.

However, it was the project implemented by the government of Brasilia, which benefited 25,000 families with a minimum monthly salary, that consolidated the idea and led to its being adopted as a model in other municipalities in Brazil and abroad.

The programme to be implemented by the central government this year entails an innovation: the stipends will be paid through magnetic cards, in order to prevent the diversion of funds and other irregularities.

Furthermore, it will be the mothers who receive the aid, and only in the last resort, the father or other male guardian of the student. “The mother is the pillar of the family, and will make sure that these funds are better administered,” said Cardoso.

Designating women as the direct recipients of the stipends is a long-standing demand by women’s organisations, and follows recommendations by experts, who say it is the best way to ensure that social programmes are successful in meeting their goals.

Many of Brazil’s poorest households are female-headed.

Authorities in Brazil hope the expansion of the school-bonus programme will help make access to basic schooling in Brazil universal. Today, 97 percent of seven to 14-year-olds are enrolled in school.

Another aim of the programme is to eliminate child labour, which affects an estimated four million minors in Brazil.

When the central government’s school-bonus programme went into effect in 1998, it targeted areas where minors were frequently found working in hazardous labour like the production of vegetable coal or in harvesting sisal, a fiber used by the textile industry. The machetes and processing machines used in the sisal fields have left many children and their parents blind or missing fingers or limbs.