Mexico's Oportunidades Program

Oportunidades is the principal anti-poverty program of the Mexican government, which helps poor families in rural and urban communities to invest in human capital - improving the education, health, and nutrition of their children-by providing cash transfers. The program's ongoing evaluation process has strengthened its legitimacy in Mexico, leading to its expansion into urban areas, and to its support across political administrations and donors. So far, the results are extremely positive in the areas of school enrollment, health clinic attendance, education, and nutrition. The success of Oportunidades demonstrates that conditional cash transfer programs of this nature can be effective in reducing current poverty while improving children's futures. In addition, it showed that it is feasible to carry out a targeted conditional cash transfer program on a very large scale even in poor isolated areas with few services, and in particular in a developing country with a limited welfare system.