Global Policy Forum

Officials Say Program Cuts Truancy, Hunger

By Jon Jeter

Jobs and even sewers are scarce in this sun-baked scrubland town of cattle farms and narrow, dusty roads. But if work and water often fail, there is at least one thing here that is sure as sunrise: When the schoolhouse opens in the morning, Rosemary Goncalves, 15, will be waiting at the door. "She hasn't missed a day in more than two years," said her mother, Gail dos Santos, 35, as the two stood outside the family's toolshed-size hovel.

Only a few years ago, Rosemary could cut class with the best of them, earning some money here and there doing odd jobs for one of the wealthier farmers in town, unloading packages for the general store or just hanging out with friends who were taking the day off from school, too. Both her parents had dropped out of high school, so truancy was never as much of an issue in their household as hunger.

But then the governor of the federal district of Brasilia began offering stipends to poor parents whose children regularly showed up for school. It's not much -- $5 per child per month for up to three children per household. But in this hardscrabble town in central Brazil, 40 miles northeast of Brasilia, the capital, that's enough to fill empty stomachs and classrooms. And in a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of about $75 a month, it's a significant sum.

"A lot of the kids in town who didn't go to school before go to school every day now," said dos Santos, who has worked as a maid but has been unemployed for most of the last three years. She has two other children for whom she receives the monthly stipend, for a total of $15. "All my kids' grades have just shot up. A little bit of money can make a huge difference for families as poor as we are."

Brazil's school stipend program is a strikingly promising and innovative social program, a relatively small public investment that goes a long way toward addressing hunger, literacy, child labor and exclusion, officials said. Since it began as a pilot program in Brasilia and satellite towns like Formosa seven years ago, the effort has nearly doubled the number of children attending school here, officials added. And though research remains incomplete, many educators and activists expect commensurate increases in literacy and nutrition.

"It is a quantifiable and unequivocal success," said Cristovam Buarque, Brazil's education minister, who was governor of Brasilia when the pilot program began. "The problem with education in Brazil is largely the problem of access," he said. "If kids don't go to school because they have to work, and they have to work because they have to eat, then you can't begin to talk about education until you figure out a way to get them to walk into the schoolhouse door every day."

But the school stipend initiative -- known here by its Portuguese name, Bolsa Escola -- also represents the central dilemma for Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker and union leader who is trying to combat a budget deficit while promoting social programs. Lula, as the president is widely known, was elected six months ago after a campaign in which he pledged to repay the country's $260 billion foreign debt while also focusing on the hungry, jobless and illiterate.

Brazil must pay about $43 billion in yearly interest payments on its foreign debt, about three-quarters of its annual $60 billion in export earnings. Yet Lula is committed to maintaining the $700 million yearly school stipend program even as he continues to seek billions of dollars in budget cuts. Education Minister Buarque and other proponents are seeking even more funding for the stipend program, which currently has a nationwide enrollment of about 5 million families and 9 million children. For the program to be really effective -- particularly in the densely populated urban areas -- stipends should be increased, Buarque said. "It will be truly a pity if we cannot increase the stipend," Buarque said. "Just a real shame."

Here in Formosa, a community of roughly 85,000 people, local government officials dole out the stipend to mothers once a month through bank cards but only if their children attend 85 percent of classes. "We tried to arrange for the mothers to collect the money closer to their homes, but we found that they liked going to the bank every month," said Marcelo Aguiar, national secretary for the Bolsa Escola program. "For a lot of them it was the first bank account they ever had in their lives, and it made them feel like a part of the community, like citizens."

Since the stipend was introduced, vagrancy and petty crime in Formosa have declined sharply, according to government statistics. The 5,100 children enrolled locally take fewer sick days and grow taller, on average, than those who are not enrolled, officials said. "You can just see the difference," said Nara Martins Pegoraro Guimares, Formosa's welfare secretary and wife of the city's mayor. "If you take 5,000 kids off the streets, it's bound to make a difference." Three of those children belong to Marcelina dos Santos, 32, a single mother who lives with her five children in a two-room brick house at the end of a dirt road here. "It was just hard to keep track of them before," said dos Santos, a wiry, barefoot woman. "They might start off going to school in the morning, but they wouldn't always end up there. A lot of times they would want to find some way to make some money so they could eat. We didn't have a lot of food at home."

But the $15 a month helps dos Santos put at least breakfast and dinner on the table each day. "The kids seem happier. They are certainly all doing much better at school. I make sure they go. If they get sick, I march right down to that school and tell anyone who will listen that they're sick. "We take school a lot more seriously now."

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