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Tuesday November 24, 2009

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Past Event

A Global Economy and Development, Wolfensohn Center for Development and Latin America Initiative Event

Progress Against Poverty: Sustaining Mexico's Progresa-Oportunidades Program

Mexico, Latin America, Global Poverty, Global Economics, Development


Event Summary

Since its creation in 1997 by Santiago Levy, Mexico's anti-poverty program "Progresa-Oportunidades" has received widespread attention and acclaim for its success in helping more than five million poor families break out of poverty. With its comprehensive focus on nutrition, health, education and evaluation, Progresa-Oportunidades is being considered for replication across the globe, as other countries and cities search for effective ways to help end the cycle of poverty.

Event Information

When

Monday, January 08, 2007
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Map

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

On January 8, the Wolfensohn Center for Development hosted a discussion with Santiago Levy, former Mexican Deputy Minister of Finance, about his book Progress Against Poverty. Levy analyzed the factors contributing to the success of the program and the challenges in further implementation. Following his remarks, leading experts discussed how the program has influenced the spread of similar anti-poverty initiatives in other countries.

Transcript

SANTIAGO LEVY: To my good fortune, Mr. Wolfensohn shared with me that he was thinking of this initiative at Brookings, but that he was trying to do something different, that he was trying to start a center on development and work on policy and work on poverty, but there was not going to be a center on technical research, but he was trying to answer something that bothered him immensely while he was President of the World Bank for ten years.

It was a fact that on many occasions he saw good programs, but that either these programs were too small to have an impact on people or they were too short of an impact on people. So the issue, how can these programs be made large scaled and how can this program be made sustainable so that they have a lasting impact on the poor, was part of the centerpiece of the research agenda or the Wolfensohn Center.

And after that conversation with Mr. Wolfensohn and quite a few conversations with Johannes, this book evolved, and the defects are still my responsibility, but some of the good points have to have with Johannes and the good points he made along the way.

The book is about three ideas. One idea is a very simple idea to economists, which is, in general, if you want to transfer income to people, and you want to do so because people are poor, poor people will probably like that to be in cash rather than the form of lower prices for electricity, lower prices for gasoline, or for food, or for some consumption good.

The idea, however, can't just be a pure cash transfer because you would like this not to be necessary. You would like the poverty program to end, not right away, but the real success of a poverty program is that it becomes no longer necessary after some time.


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