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| Anti-poverty Policies and Citizenry: The "Chile Solidario" Experience |
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Regular surveys carried out under Chile’s system of National Surveys on Socio-economic Characterization (CASEN) show a drastic fall in the rates of poverty and indigence throughout the 1990s. However the 1998 and 2000 surveys show the numbers of indigent stabilized at around 5.7% in those years, and this led to a review of the policies and programmes aimed at rooting out extreme poverty. The participants included the President of the Republic and his advisers, ministerial experts, NGOs and consultants. The first step towards a new strategy was the Programa Puente (“The Bridge Programme”), which offered psychosocial support to indigent families to help them acquire the social skills and training needed to escape their condition. At the same time, a broader programme was developed which included a social protection network for these families and offered an integrated approach combining immediate assistance with longer-term skills development.
This programme, Chile Solidario, requires the family to sign a contract to meet 53 specified minimum conditions seen as necessary to overcome extreme poverty. In exchange, they receive from the State: psychosocial support, protection bonds, guaranteed cash subsidies, and preferential access to skill development, work and social security programmes. In its three years in operation the scheme can show substantial progress in terms of coverage, and low levels of rejection and interruption. But its formulation confirms the trend of handing over policy-making largely to those with scientific and technical training, providing very little citizen participation or consultation in either defining or seeking solutions to problems.
The programme’s overall objective is to achieve the social integration of indigent families by bringing them into the public network of social services, by making them, in other words, real rather than purely formal citizens. The programme could achieve its overall aim more successfully, we suggest, if it were opened out beyond intra-family relations to encourage greater associativity and participation in the community. |
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Document Type |
MOST Policy Paper |
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Format |
application/pdf |
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Website (URL) |
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001402/140240e.pdf |
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Author(s) |
Palma, Julieta; Urzúa, Raúl |
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Publisher |
UNESCO / MOST Programme |
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Publication Location |
Paris, France |
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Publication Year |
2005 |
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Volume/Issue Number |
12 |
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Number of Pages |
32 p. |
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Series Title |
MOST policy papers, new series MOST-2 |
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