The Emergence and Popularity of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America

Since the mid-1990s a new trend in social policies has appeared in Latin America: the provision of grants to targeted poor households on condition that they engage in human capital investments, such as sending children to school and making periodic visits to health centres. These programmes, known as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), address demand-side constraints for structural poverty reduction, through an incentive scheme that combines the short-term objectives of safety nets with long-term goals of breaking intergenerational poverty traps.