Oportunidades (Opportunities)

The programme is characterised by rigorous selection of recipients based on specific geographical and socioeconomic factors. It has four main components:

1. Cash transfers for keeping children in school - grants are provided for primary through high school. The grants increase as children progress to higher grades and, beginning at the secondary level, are slightly higher for girls than for boys;
2. A free essential health care package known as PESS (for its name in Spanish, Paquete Esencial de Servicios de Salud) that involves services for groups with specific needs, such as women who are pregnant, in the aftermath of giving birth, or breastfeeding;
3. A nutritional supplementation programme that includes a fixed monetary transfer, equal to about US$15.50 (155 pesos) monthly, for improved food consumption, as well as nutritional supplement; and
4. A health component, including a set of health promotion talks.
   

Specifically, the core strategy underpinning this initiative is making aid dependent on impoverished families' participation in taking responsibility for their own health and well-being. This strategy is called conditional cash transfer (CCT), and sets out requirements that families must meet. Centrally, in the realm of communication, both heads of the beneficiary households and (since 2001) students of middle-high education level must attend monthly health promotion talks. In the area of reproductive health, these talks include information on family planning, prenatal care, alarm signs during pregnancy, and newborn care. The attendance at health promotion talks is a co-responsibility of the programme participants (along with keeping the children in school and attending a set of check-up visits at the health services). Families who fail to attend may be excluded from the programme, and therefore lose the benefit of the essential health care package.

The assumption is that, in the case of focused health actions, and particularly family planning, utilisation of services is tightly linked to the key change in behaviour, which is increasing contraceptive use in the beneficiary population. Organisers expect that the health promotion talks have the potential of directly influencing the use of family planning methods by recruiting new users of these services, reinforcing the use of contraceptive methods among those who already use them, or by modifying the norm with regards to the size of the family.

Cash payments are made from the government directly to families to decrease overhead and corruption. Programme recipients are mothers, the caregiver directly responsible for children and family health decisions. From the beginning, a system of evaluation and statistical controls has been put in place to ensure effectiveness.

Family Planning, Population, Health, Education.

The name of this programme was changed to Oportunidades in 2002. According to organisers, Oportunidades has become a model for programmes instituted in other countries, such as a pilot programme in New York City (New York, the United States) called Opportunity NYC and the Social Protection Network in Nicaragua. Approximately 20 other countries around the world have instituted similar conditional cash transfer programmes.