Just guaranteeing a higher amount for the new Bolsa Família – current Auxílio Brasil – will not be enough for the next government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) to have a successful policy in the fight against poverty. Without debugging the Cadastro Único and focusing on the profile of the people served, the program could become inefficient and have a result below its potential. And the new government’s transition team knows that a “fine-tooth comb” will be needed in terms of benefits, with an eye in particular on individual concessions.
The assessment is that the country started to face a distortion in the Single Registry. There was a strong growth in the number of families composed of only one member – called unipessoal – included by the social program. In August, around 5.3 million were in this condition.
The Ministry of Citizenship has already instituted a procedure to verify the increase in single-person families benefited and informed that it also carries out a “treatment of the entire public of the Cadastro Único” in partnership with Dataprev.
In the case of single-person families, the calculation will start for those registered included or updated after November 2021, when they totaled 2.2 million. That is, 3 million beneficiaries will have to update the data to avoid blocking the benefit. “There is a registration qualification agenda. It is a big agenda and presents a huge challenge”, says Vinicius Botelho, former secretary of Social Development and Citizenship.
In the Cadastro Único, the beneficiary makes a self-declaration of income and family composition. At the height of the pandemic, the way in which registration was carried out helped to cause the database to deteriorate. To release the Emergency Aid, later transformed into Brazil Aid, the Jair Bolsonaro government made it possible for beneficiaries to join it through an application, without the need for a major action by agents from the Social Assistance Reference Centers (Cras) to, for example, mapping the poorest and monitoring the profile of the enrolled population.
In the transition team, the main concern has been with the quality of the registration and with the legacy that will be left by the investigation opened by the Ministry of Citizenship. “This will impact the government, we are going to take over with a process in which we were not consulted”, says Tereza Campello, one of the coordinators of the transition’s social assistance area. “I’m not complaining about the government opening these processes, but it should have done so sooner.”
The new government was also alerted by the Federal Audit Court (TCU) about the distortion. “The Lula government will take over with 1 million people being called in January and 2 million people being called in February to attend Cras or (the benefits) will be blocked”, says Campello. “The person will not receive it and what will he do? Go to Cras and try to find out what happened. We are going to have the government take over with a lot of queuing.”
Criticism of the design
In addition to the lack of the Cadastro Único, another major criticism by analysts is that the design of the current Auxílio Brasil takes into account family income, not per capita. In other words, families with two or six members receive the same R$600. “A good program design considers the family composition to define the transfer”, says Laura Muller Machado, professor at Insper and former secretary of Social Development of São Paulo .
The next Bolsa Família should cost BRL 175 billion, as provided for in the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) of the Transition, which removed the benefit from the spending ceiling and maintained the value of BRL 600, in addition to creating an additional BRL 150 for children up to six years old. If confirmed, it will be an amount spent that will be equivalent to almost five times the budget of the original program, which was R$ 33 billion – in values adjusted for inflation, it reaches R$ 41 billion.
“In the current management, there was a disintermediation of social policy”, says Marcelo Neri, director of FGV Social. “All the literature (fighting poverty) is based on per capita income, not on household income. In the current design of Auxílio Brasil, he estimates that there is a waste of 55% of money. “More could be done with the same resources.”
The format of the new Bolsa Família, says Tereza Campello, who served as Minister of Social Development and Fight against Hunger in the Dilma Rousseff administration, should only become clearer in the new government. “Our project wants to resume the main features of Bolsa Família”, she says. “The first is that the design took family composition into account, and the second issue is that the program considered it fundamental that children and pregnant women had the right and access to education and health.”
overcoming poverty
More than resolving the short-term issue of social assistance, Brazil has an important challenge of making the beneficiaries of the social program permanently overcome poverty.
Last year, 9.5% of the Brazilian population lived in extreme poverty – with a monthly per capita income of less than R$ 193 -, the highest level since 2007, when 10.7% were in this condition, show data compiled by the professor. from Insper.
“The design of an exit door program, which will make people achieve autonomy, is not clear”, says Laura. “Brasil Sem Miséria, for example, was a well-designed, documented program and had a proposal on how to productively include those in the rural area and those in the urban area in the labor market.”
There is no rule for overcoming poverty. It is necessary to take into account the reality of each family and region of the country. The solution may lie in getting a daycare center for a single mother who needs to work or securing professional training courses for an unemployed worker.
“Just transferring income is not enough. Three things are needed. Assistance, of course, is one of them, and a higher price already solves most of the problems, but it is not enough”, says Naercio Menezes, coordinator of the Ruth Cardoso Chair and also a professor at Insper. “It is also necessary to have a quality education and health system.”
The information is from the newspaper The State of S. Paulo.
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