Opportunities for the Poor, Co‐responsibilities for Women: Female Capabilities and Vulnerability in Human Development Policy and Practice

Abstract

This paper looks at a particular type of anti‐poverty aid and its implications for gender inequality. The development model underpinning the Mexican Oportunidades Programme, a ‘flagship’ in Latin America, focuses on the reduction of inter‐generational poverty through transfers conditioned on ‘co‐responsibilities’ fulfilled especially by mothers and aimed at strengthening the human capital of household members. Through a consultant‐insider narrative on the tension between this policy model and the actual lives of beneficiaries, the paper scrutinizes the delivery of the Programme in the light of the capabilities approach. Some case studies are then examined within this framework, assessing the position of women in each case by reviewing the state of their capabilities and resources. This exercise reveals social relationships obscured by the Programme’s representations and assumptions of gender roles within families, pointing to a significant failure to address women’s own needs by development schemes aimed at poverty rather than at inequality.

Key words:

• Poverty
• Inequality
• Oportunidades Programme
• Capability approach
• Family
• Women
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this paper was delivered at the Poverty and Capital Conference, the University of Manchester, 4 July 2007. I would like to thank Lucy Ferguson and the three anonymous Journal of Human Development Capabilities reviewers for their insightful comments. I am also indebted to the Dirección de Investigación (DINV) at the Universidad Iberoamericana for financial support. All translations from Spanish are my own.

Notes

1 Oportunidades is subject to regular—both quantitative and qualitative—external evaluations that were planned since the Programme’s very inception (see, for example, Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha, 2004). The most systematic qualitative evaluations were carried out, since 1999/2000, by a team of social researchers affiliated to the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), which I joined in 2005. The results of the evaluations are available on the website (http://evaluacion.oportunidades.gob.mx:8010/index2.php?a=768).

2 This new focus was actually stimulated by the evaluation’s change in character during 2006. In that year, the qualitative evaluation team’s aim was to depart from the logic of the consultancy study and produce instead an analytical work on the relationships between Oportunidades and the social and economic organization of beneficiary households (see González de la Rocha, 2006). Both this analysis and the evaluation research conducted in 2005, 2007 and 2008 were funded by the Inter‐American Development Bank via the Oportunidades Programme.

3 During a meeting with our evaluation team, Oportunidades’ officials recognized that gender had been a matter of intense debate within the Programme, yet, they assured us, they would have never expressed publicly a ‘gender aim’ for fear of ‘getting ourselves into trouble’. The results of an audit of the Programme’s gender effects have recently been published (López and Salles, 2006).

4 Oportunidades’ declared objective is to curb the intergenerational poverty cycle in all households in ‘extreme poverty’, yet it is important to examine which domestic scenarios are particularly suited to the fulfilment of the Programme’s requirements and to the generation of advantages resulting from its conditional transfers. Very significantly, after dismissing my argument about the ‘ideal’ household implicit in the Oportunidades’ operational guidelines, a Programme official naively asked me: ‘isn’t that rather the type of household in which people would take better advantage of the Programme’s aid?’

5 For the analysis carried out in 2006, we revised 252 case studies resulting from the qualitative‐ethnographic evaluations of Oportunidades conducted between 2001 and 2005. Fifty‐seven of those 252 cases corresponded to female‐headed households—where, regardless of male presence and declared headship, women had been found to contribute the greatest and/or the most regular earnings. This actually came close to national‐level data, with 23% of female‐headed households being reported in Mexico for 2005 (Consejo Nacional de Población [CONAPO], 2007). In a rather conservative manner, the CONAPO report attributes this to ‘separation, divorce and widowhood’, so we may presume there to be a higher rate of female headship than that yielded by the use of the male‐biased criterion of ‘single‐female parent household’. On the other hand, 136 of our 252 cases were households at the dispersion stage of the domestic cycle. That stage starts with the end of reproductive age (around 40 years in the case of women) and is characterized by the loss of young productive members through marriage and migration. This factor of greater vulnerability is deepened by the fact that many households in dispersion comprise exclusively elderly adults who are unable to work or to sustain themselves. Mexican single‐member households amounted to 7.6% in 2005, with as much as 44% of them comprising adults aged 60 or over; this situation is more frequent among women—three out of five households show those characteristics (CONAPO, 2007).