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April 25, 2007

Oportunidades in Afghanistan?

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented how various problems -- security, poverty, and negative attitudes about education -- have undermined progress in ensuring education for Afghanistan's children.  School infrastructure has received a lot of attention but enrollment rates have plateaued -- especially among girls.

This story in today's NY Times suggested that Mexico has managed to simultaneously raise enrollment rates, reduce poverty, and improve health. The program provides cash payments to women on a contingent basis: "If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish":

The program pays cash stipends mostly to mothers — about 97 percent of recipients are women — on the assumption that they will be more likely to spend the money on their children. To qualify, people must be in extreme poverty, roughly defined by officials here as living on less than the equivalent of $2 a day.

The article notes that "Since this program got its start in rural Mexico in 1997, it has been heralded by the World Bank and others as a powerful model for fighting chronic poverty." In a decade, Mexico's poverty rate has dropped by 17 percentage points. Over thirty countries have adopted versions of the program. Should Afghanistan become one of them?

Posted by Carl Robichaud on April 25, 2007 at 06:32 PM in Economics, Education, Reconstruction, Women |

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Comments

timoteowork

Are there any oportunidades for an Oportunidades in Mexico?
I'm a big fan of the Mexican scheme -which has achieved much merited praise for its conditional transfer payments. My fear is that the program could not be readily implemented in Afghanistan.
Why have school enrollment and attendance rates plateaued? Not because families need the labor, which could be a contributing factor in rural Mexico, but because of security concerns and cultural prohibitions. Perhaps school infrastructure, although it has received so much funding, still has not reached the remote and more destabilized regions. Mexico's lack of infrastructure is much less severe.
So while Mexico's program has been successful, and while it would likely have some success in Afghanistan, there are concerns that must be addressed before we misapply the model.
1. Can the program be administered in a sufficiently transparent system as to prevent or reduce corruption?
2. Will an economic incentive (where the money will come from is not an insignificant concern) encourage school enrollment? Or are the cultural barriers and security concerns too high to be overcome by monthly transfer payments?
3. How much capacity does the infrastructure have to absorb additional students?

I've only addressed the schools, but Oportunidades is designed as a holistic human capital development system, and as such, these concerns apply to the health sector and Measurement and Evaulation capacity of the provincial/local governments.

I hate to be a pessimist, but I think that pushing this system before there is a local capacity to properly administer it would lead to limited success. I think your point wasn't that Afghanistan should implement Oportunidades, but that it could. I agree, just not yet.

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