CAN CASH HAND-OUTS CURE POVERTY?
Daiana Borges shudders when she recalls her family’s days of hunger. She is 37 and has 4 children; she married young. As a black woman living in a poor neighbourhood, her prospects weren’t promising and she started her working life as a cleaner. Disaster struck seven years ago when both she and her husband became unemployed. Two years of hunger and dependency on the help of relatives followed – made especially hard because their children were still small. ‘We had absolutely nothing,’ she recalls. ‘We couldn’t find work, not even a temporary position, nothing.’
For her, the turning point came via the Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance) programme, a helping hand from the state: a regular, small strings-attached cash transfer. The pioneering programme has divided critics – praised to the skies for tackling extreme poverty and also criticized for going nowhere near far enough.
