Family Futures

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Latin American families:

the challenges of poverty and childcare

Maria Nieves Rico, Senior Social Affairs Officer, Heidi Ullmann, Associate Social Affairs Officer and Carlos Maldonado

Valera, Social Affairs Officer, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

onfronting

amily

overty

atin American families have changed significantly

over the course of the last two decades, owing to

marked declines in fertility throughout the region,

an increase in female labour force participation, and shift-

ing attitudes and norms regarding cohabitation. However,

these changes in family structure have not occurred in

a uniform manner across the socioeconomic spectrum.

This line of analysis is particularly relevant in the Latin

American context given the persistently high levels of

economic inequality in the region.

According to recent estimates by the United Nations

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

(ECLAC), while the average household size in Latin America

has decreased, lower income households are still more

numerous than wealthier households. In 2010 lower income

households had, on average, almost two more members than

wealthier households. This difference in average household

size, which reflects differential patterns of fertility and living

arrangements, has implications for the level of dependence

and the needs of different types of households along the

income distribution.

Besides household size, family composition also differs

depending on income level. A salient feature of households in

the richest income quintile is that they are increasingly non-

family households: single-person households comprise over

20 per cent of households in the richest income quintile, and

nuclear households without children just under 20 per cent.

In contrast, households in the poorest income quintiles tend

to be two-parent nuclear families with children, two-parent

extended households and single-parent nuclear households,

primarily headed by women.

Regardless of the type of household in which they reside,

households with children are overrepresented in the poorest

income quintiles. At the regional level, the majority of house-

holds in the poorest income quintiles are households with

children, while in the richest income quintile, this trend is

reversed and most are households without children.

The link between poverty and households with children

is maintained even when the proportion of households with

children is reduced. For example, although the majority of

Uruguayan households do not have children, an overwhelm-

ing majority of poor households do. This does not imply that

children make the household poor; rather, more children are

born to parents with low educational attainment and weak

labour market insertion. This, together with the absence or

inadequacy of social policies and programmes, in particular

mechanisms for social protection, translates into increased

vulnerability for households with children, which is especially

true for single-parent households headed by women.

Many countries in the region have implemented condi-

tional cash transfer (CCT) programmes to address the

challenges faced by poor families with children. The basic

structure of CCT programmes entails the transfer of mone-

tary and non-monetary resources to families with children,

living in poverty or extreme poverty, on condition that

they fulfil specific commitments. These programmes have

a two-pronged approach to addressing poverty in families:

in the short term, they aim to increase family consumption

through monetary transfers. A longer-term objective of these

programmes is to increase human capital in order to disrupt

the intergenerational transmission of poverty by requir-

ing that children and adolescents in recipient households

comply with school attendance requirements and participate

in regular health checks.

Currently, there are 25 CCT programmes targeted at fami-

lies in 20 countries in the region. These programmes target

the family unit as a whole, rather than its individual members,

and give a leading role to women who are primarily respon-

sible not only for handling the transfers but also for fulfilling

the commitments. In the vast majority of cases, the transfers

are actually paid to the mothers on the assumption that they

will use the resources to improve the well-being of the family

as a whole and of their children in particular.

Although the evidence regarding their impact, particularly

their long-term impact, is mixed, CCT programmes have

helped to sustain consumption among the poorest households

and they appear to have had an impact on poverty, especially

extreme poverty and in rural areas. In Mexico, transfers from

one of the longest-standing programmes, Oportunidades

(formerly Progresa), represent approximately 10 per cent

of the income of the poorest families. Other evaluations of

Progresa-Oportunidades, one of the most extensively assessed

CCT programmes in the region, reveal positive impacts in

other dimensions, mostly observed in rural settings. These

include reduced gender gaps in school enrolment, greater

educational opportunities among recipients, increases in

school enrolment, reduced dropout rate among adolescents,

and improved transitions from primary to secondary school.

Others have documented positive effects of this programme