SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE
These accomplishments have made Bolsa Família incredibly popular in Brazil; recent polls put its approval rating at around 75 percent. “Today everybody’s happy,” Lavinas told me. “The poor because they are less poor, and the rich because the program is so cheap that they don’t care.” Even the middle class, traditionally the most conservative segment of Brazil’s electorate, has embraced Bolsa Família. As Spektor explains, this group “grew up in a country that was always getting worse. As Brazil democratized [in the mid-1980s], violence went up, inequality went up, inflation went up. We were geared toward thinking things were awful. If you hoped for a future, you wanted to learn English and get the hell out of here. Now, suddenly, I’d rather be here than anywhere else. And that’s thanks to Bolsa.”
Seeing how popular the program is and how much it did to help Lula’s political fortunes over the years, virtually all other Brazilian politicians have rushed to embrace it. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor, has expanded the program’s reach and upped its benefits several times. She even launched an initiative called Busca Ativa (Active Search) that sends intrepid social workers to the country’s most remote corners—sometimes by jungle boat—in search of more needy Brazilians to enroll in the program. Meanwhile, during the 2014 election, both of her opponents promised to extend Bolsa Família still further. To do otherwise would have been “political suicide,” says Thiago de Aragão, a political consultant in Brasília.
None of this enthusiasm means that Bolsa Família is perfect. Although the program has helped Brazil make historic progress, the country still remains far too unequal. Under Rousseff, economic growth has ground to a halt and the country’s debt has soared. And despite Bolsa Família’s massive reach, about 28 million Brazilians still live in poverty. Some experts worry that by focusing so intensely on the needs of Brazilian children, the program neglects their impoverished parents (whose benefits drop precipitously when their children reach 17). Feminist scholars such as Maxine Molyneux of University College London caution that “by making transfers conditional on ‘good motherhood,’” initiatives such as Bolsa Família reinforce traditional gender roles. And Lavinas, among others, points out that while the Brazilian government has done a good job getting kids into school, it has done far less to improve the education they receive there—one of many reasons massive numbers of Brazilians took to the streets to protest poor government services in 2013.
Bolsa Família’s positive impact is also undermined by Brazil’s regressive tax system, which relies excessively on consumption tariffs. These fees, which cover virtually every imaginable good and many services, eat up a big share—as much as 55 percent, by some estimates—of Bolsa Família stipends. Finally, financial analysts attack Bolsa Família for reducing inequality at the expense of overall growth, and some Brazilians still insist the cash transfers only make people more dependent on the dole.
Certainly, Bolsa Família can and should be improved. Brazil also desperately needs tax, health-care, and educational reform, as well as greater investment in infrastructure. But a wealth of evidence contradicts at least some of the critics’ charges. Government statistics show that 75 percent of adult Bolsa Família recipients do work, for example, and generally those who don’t, can’t—because they live in areas with too few job opportunities.
It should come as no surprise,
then, that despite its imperfections, the program has attracted wide admiration abroad as well as at home. Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Washington-based Center for Global Development, has called Bolsa Família “as close as you can come to a magic bullet in development.” Other boosters range from The New York Times (which dubbed Bolsa Família “likely the most important government anti-poverty program the world has ever seen”) to The Economist (which declared it “a stunning success”).
Perhaps the best testament to the brilliance of Bolsa Família’s design, however—as well to the defiantly unorthodox, something-for-everyone approach Lula used to formulate and then sell it—is the fact that since the program’s creation, more than 63 countries have sent experts to Brazil to copy its model. Within just a few years of Bolsa Família’s inception, in fact, the MDS was so swamped by all the foreign requests for advice that it began holding twice-yearly seminars on how to launch similar programs elsewhere. As of this writing, at least 40 states have taken that step, including most of the countries of Latin America, as well as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa, and Turkey (to name just a few). There have even been some copycat programs deployed in U.S. cities, such as Memphis and New York—more proof, if it’s needed, of the global appeal of Brazil’s great experiment.