Conditional Cash Transfers, Gender and Human Rights: Experiences of Indigenous Men and Women from San Juan Cancuc, Chiapas

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been regarded as one of the main policy tools to eradicate poverty. The mechanism of CCTs consists on providing cash to low-income families with the co-responsibilities of attending to regular health check-ups, keeping children at school and attending workshops among others. The cash transfer is usually given to mothers of the family. There has been a lot of research on the impact of CCTs in terms of health, education and on the gendered outcomes of these programmes; however,there is less attention on how low-income families experience the delivery of the cash transfer and whether a conditional cash transfer is what they think is required to improve their lives. There is a clear gap between official programmatic goals of CCTs and the experiences of the recipients particularly for indigenous peoples. Prospera is one of the first CCTs implemented and the most evaluated CCT in the world. This programme claims to have a human rights approach addressing indigenous peoples’ needs. This research uses a human rights and a gender approach to investigate how this happens on the ground by using a case study of San Juan Cancuc, in Chiapas, Mexico. This work is based on UN documents; official documents from Prospera such as the Rules of Operation and on interviews with indigenous men and women; health personnel from San Juan Cancuc; government officers from the programme at local and national level and with key experts who were involved on the creation of Prospera. This research finds that there is an urgent call to embrace the experiences and views on poverty and CCTs of indigenous men and women when designing and implementing these programmes.