Scaling Up Oportunidades and Its Impact on Child Nutrition
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World Bank, Washington, DC
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Oportunidades was an innovative
anti-poverty program that put additional resources in the
hands of women and their families and encouraged parents to
invest in the human capital of their children. This program
was the first in its kind, and early evaluations
demonstrating its success informed its large expansion
within Mexico and the implementation of similar conditional
cash transfer programs across the world. However, the
existing evidence, which arguably captures causal positive
impacts, relies on a sample of very poor rural children.
This paper conducts the first evaluation of the program
using representative data. It focuses on child height as a
marker of long-term nutritional status. The causal impact of
the program on child height is isolated by exploiting
insights from the biology of child growth in combination
with the timing of the rollout of Oportunidades and the
panel dimension of the survey. Height for age among children
exposed during the first four years of life is contrasted
with similar children who were not exposed. Consistent with
previous evidence, this analysis finds positive and sizable
effects on children who lived in rural poor communities
incorporated at the beginning of the intervention. In
contrast, the impacts of the program in rural localities
incorporated later and in suburban and urban communities
are, at best, very modest.
Palabras clave
MATERNAL AND CHILD NUTRITION, RURAL POVERTY, CASH TRANSFERS, HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENT IN RURAL CHILDREN, NUTRITION PROGRAMS, NUTRITION POLICY AND PROGRAMS, STUNTING