Municipal and federal governments in Brazil have created a series of minimum income guarantee programmes that aim to tackle intergenerational poverty, on a large scale and within a rights
framework.
These programmes represent a silent revolution in the form and size of government antipoverty intervention. In little more than a decade, income guarantee programmes have become the country’s principal anti-poverty strategy, dwarfing the patchwork of charitable or non-profit organisations that have, with public funding, historically sought to meet the needs of the poor.
In the city of São Paulo, the Minimum Family-Income Guarantee Programme, henceforth Renda Mínima, provides monthly income grants to almost 150,000 families living in extreme poverty, or around 600,000 people.1 Building on such municipal initiatives, the federal government’s Bolsa Família (Family Grant) offers similar grants to an unprecedented 11.2 million families, an estimated third of the country’s population.
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