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Opportunities for the Poor,Co‐responsibilities for Women: FemaleCapabilities and Vulnerab ility in HumanDevelopment Policy and PracticeAlejandro Agudo Sanchíz a

a Social Anthropology at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City,Mexico

Version of record first published: 19 Nov 2010

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Journal of Human Development and Capabilities Vol. 11, No. 4, November 2010

ISSN 1945-2829 print/ISSN 1945-2837 online/10/040533-22 © 2010 United Nations Development ProgrammeDOI: 10.1080/19452829.2010.520915

Opportunities for the Poor,Co-responsibilities for Women: FemaleCapabilities and Vulnerability in HumanDevelopment Policy and Practice

ALEJANDRO AGUDO SANCHÍZ Alejandro Agudo Sanchíz is Professor of Social Anthropology at Universidad

Iberoamericana, Mexico City, MexicoTaylor and FrancisCJHD_A_520915.sgm10.1080/19452829.2010.520915Journal of Human Development and Capabilities1945-2829 (print)/1945-2837 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis114000000November 2010AlejandroAgudo Sanchí[email protected]

Abstract This paper looks at a particular type of anti-poverty aid and itsimplications for gender inequality. The development model underpinningthe Mexican Oportunidades Programme, a ‘flagship’ in Latin America,focuses on the reduction of inter-generational poverty through transfersconditioned on ‘co-responsibilities’ fulfilled especially by mothers and aimedat strengthening the human capital of household members. Through aconsultant-insider narrative on the tension between this policy model and theactual lives of beneficiaries, the paper scrutinizes the delivery of theProgramme in the light of the capabilities approach. Some case studies arethen examined within this framework, assessing the position of women ineach case by reviewing the state of their capabilities and resources. Thisexercise reveals social relationships obscured by the Programme’srepresentations and assumptions of gender roles within families, pointing toa significant failure to address women’s own needs by development schemesaimed at poverty rather than at inequality.

Key words: Poverty, Inequality, Oportunidades Programme, Capability

approach, Family, Women, Mexico

Introduction

This paper is the result of my four-year experience as an anthropologist-consultant on a project for the external evaluation of the vast Mexican anti-poverty programme known as Oportunidades (‘Opportunities’). 1 In 2006 Itook a qualitative step further and began to treat the Programme itself as anobject of ethnographic exploration. 2 I was then confronted with a key research problem; namely, the constant tension and complex relationship

existing between the representation and the orientation of social practice by policy models. My aim here is to raise some questions about the particular

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interests, events and exclusions in which policy is actually rooted (Mosse,2005, pp. 132–156). By pointing out the significant omissions that character-ize policy, my purpose is to highlight the difficulties of application of currentdevelopment programmes. For instance, as this article will discuss, gender

inequality is present in certain ways in the policy model of Oportunidadesbut also shapes participants’ experience in the Programme in other ways notselected or addressed in that model.

The Programme’s selective representation of gender inequality is partly related to its novel combination of old ‘maternalist’ welfare approaches with the contractarian models of poverty relief currently endorsed by internationalpolicy actors and institutions like the World Bank (Molyneux, 2006). Thedonor-driven concept of ‘co-responsibility’—consequential with cost-sharingapproaches to risk management where beneficiaries discharge certain obliga-tions in return for the programmes’ stipends—becomes here part of acommon institutional discourse articulated around an implicit model of ‘poor household’ in which women are attributed a central role in the managementof resources in favour of younger family members.

However, it is important to note that not all households targeted by theOportunidades Programme (i.e. those in ‘extreme poverty’ and with no socialinsurance) have children of school age. By examining Oportunidades ’construction of women (as means to the development of others) and house-holds (as both a problem and an aim), this article will highlight theProgramme’s contradictions and difficulties to address human diversity andthe complexity of social and environmental contextualizations. These issues—and their relevance to poverty, well-being, and inequality—can be conceptu-alized and evaluated within the framework provided by an influential humandevelopment ‘paradigm’; namely, the capability approach. After briefly surveying this approach, I will apply it to an ethnographic examination of thedelivery of Oportunidades . This will be attempted through the use of casestudies of programme beneficiaries, where the position of women in each case

will be assessed by reviewing the state of their capabilities and actual func-tionings. The aim of this exercise will be to evaluate the Programme’s effects—or lack thereof—on women’s own needs and ends. It will be seen that womenare at best partially taken into account as ends of development in themselves,a shortcoming stemming from the Programme’s implicit assumptions of inev-

itability surrounding gender roles within families. While Martha Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach will be of great help to pursue this critique,the paper concludes with additional suggestions for addressing the impact of broader forces like international development policy—and its largely unques-tioned liaison with capitalist social relations—on individual choices.

Representations of women and households in theOportunidades Programme

One of the most extensive programmes based on the model of conditional

transfers, Oportunidades was launched in 1997 under the name PROGRESA

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(Education, Health and Nutrition Programme) and was restricted to the ruralpoor. It was revamped in 2001 and extended to cover urban and semi-urbanareas, increasing its number of beneficiary households from 2.6 million tofive million by 2005—all this on an annual budget amounting to 0.3% of

Gross Domestic Product (25 billion pesos in 2004) from federal funds,although with an eventual $1 billion loan from the Inter-American Develop-ment Bank.

From its inception, Oportunidades was explicitly aimed at stimulatingthe poor to mitigate the risk of being trapped in intergenerational poverty (Levy and Rodríguez, 2005, pp. 53–62). This is defined as a vicious circleconsisting of high birth rates—as a domestic strategy to maximize thenumber of potential workers—school drop-outs in favour of (precarious)income-generating activities, and premature establishment of new domesticgroups with a similar profile; the Programme’s preferential strategy for break-ing this intergenerational transmission of poverty is thus to stimulate house-holds’ investment in their children’s education, health and nutrition (Levy and Rodríguez, 2005, pp. x and 2; Secretaría de Desarrollo Social [SEDESOL],2008, pp. 2–4 and 6–8). This threefold target is to be met through a series of bimonthly transfers—mostly in cash—conditioned on the beneficiaries’ fulfil-ment of certain duties (‘co-responsibilities’) laid out by the Programme, espe-cially household members’ controlled attendance at health centres for regular checks and monthly workshops on self-care, as well as children’senrolment in school between the third year of primary education and the endof high school. In this way, although mothers get an stipend for apoyoalimentario (support for nutrition, currently consisting of around $35), thebimonthly transfers they receive are primarily in the form of scholarships for their children, with one payment being withheld if the child’s monthly rateof unjustified absence from school goes over 15%. Recurring failure tocomply with the requirements can lead households to being ejected from theProgramme.

The amount of the scholarship transfers is set according to estimatesabout the income that students would be contributing to their households if they worked instead of attending school, which is why grants rise with theage of the child—being currently about $58 for boys and $66 for girls at thethird year of secondary school. The amount of both scholarships and stipends

for nutrition support is adjusted every six months according to nationalinflation rates, which prevents the erosion of the transfers’ real value.The fact that scholarship stipends are about 10% higher for girls than for

boys from the onset of secondary education—when the risk of female drop-out is highest—is part of the well-known ‘gender focus’ of Oportunidades(SEDESOL, 2008, pp. 3–4), alongside the fact that cash transfers are givenexclusively to women. This has prompted much academic discussion aboutthe Programme’s degree of success regarding its purported ‘female-empowerment’ aim (for example, see Molyneux, 2006), although nowhere inthe Oportunidades ’ rules of operation do we find such an objective. 3 In this

regard, it is important to note that mothers’ human capital is, for the most

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part, indirectly modified through their attendance at health workshops andmedical checks and their reception of transfers in kind (nutritional supple-ments) if they are pregnant or breastfeeding, since the Programme does notinclude components of schooling or professional training for them. In the

Oportunidades scheme, therefore, these women are not so much ends asmeans of development: they must stay healthy with a view to their babies’good health and must administer scholarships and food expenses for their children’s benefit.

These last observations bring up the question of the specific type of house-hold implicitly privileged in the Programme’s strategy for halving intergener-ational transmission of poverty. Such an ‘ideal’ household is characterized by a given structure and stage in the domestic life-cycle, as well as based on aparticular correlation between traditional gender divisions and social construc-tions of family roles: a male bread-winner providing a basic income, a femalehousewife administering resources in favour of the group’s well-being, andchildren engaged in schooling (Agudo Sanchíz, 2006, pp. 397–398). 4

In a way, this also brings us back to the issue of the complex andcontradictory relationships existing between aid policy and practice to

which I referred above. Some empirical evidence would actually seem tosupport Oportunidades ’ tacit assumptions and explicit strategy: women’spractical interests are often associated with collective ends, while men’sgenerally greater degree of individualism may lead them to reduce or eventerminate their monetary contributions to the household (Benería andRoldán, 1987; Molyneux, 1985). Let us thus invoke, for a moment, an instru-mental/managerial type of policy logic: given the difficulty of averting theabove-mentioned inequalities in a foreseeable future and leaving aside thequestion of whether Oportunidades ‘empowers women’, the best develop-ment strategy (i.e. the more ‘realistic’ and effective in the short term) wouldbe to accompany and facilitate women’s ‘maternalist’ role in favour of thedomestic group.

However, women’s ‘traditional’ role as housewives and child-carers may clash with their income-generating activities, which are especially necessary and significant not just in single-parent, matrifocal households but also,precisely, in cases of male economic withdrawal from the household and of precariousness of employment—with the latter situation undermining the

material bases of the social construction of the male ‘bread-winner’; more-over, other households comprise exclusively ageing adults with little possi-bility of improvement through the strengthening of the young’s capabilities. 5

We might then question Oportunidades ’ model in the light of thediverse relationships that characterize domestic groups diverging from theProgramme’s implicitly privileged household type. Furthermore, we need tosituate those relationships against the wider socio-economic and politicalcontexts, dimensions, and causalities that have been struck off the narrativeof ‘cyclical transmission of poverty’. As its operational guidelines state, theProgramme ‘focuses on the family’, yet not only as the goal but also, signifi-

cantly, as the problem :

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The Programme recognises that the family is the privileged space toconfront social and economic adversities and that, at the same time,it is the place where we find the factors that tend to perpetuate theconditions of extreme poverty from generation to generation.

Through its actions, the Programme fosters the breach of the circleof intergenerational transmission of poverty. (SEDESOL, 2008, p. 3)

This problem carries its own solution in the causal model of Opor- tunidades . According to prominent economist Santiago Levy, regarded asone of the Programme’s main architects, such a solution consists of the‘temporary investment’ in human capital: since the Programme’s inception,‘emphasis is placed on aspects of human capital, which are the ones thatmotivate PROGRESA … other considerations are ignored, considerations

which would be of great importance in alternative approaches to the study of poverty’ (Levy and Rodríguez, 2005, p. 2). My concern here is actually with those other considerations that, both within and beyond households, areindeed of great importance for the examination of poverty, well-being, andinequality of opportunities. These phenomena can be addressed in two ways.Firstly, by setting the notion of human capital within a broader context so asto avoid its reduction to a simplistic and conservative causal theory reinforc-ing the idea that poverty is, in a very important sense, an outcome of the very practices of the poor—in the absence of co-responsibility-induced incentives,they are said to reproduce inter-generationally their own condition.

Secondly, the experiences of households and women in Oportunidadescan be evaluated by employing some of the alternative approaches to poverty that Levy and Rodríguez admittedly ignore. In what follows, I will shift fromhuman capital— which, as it is selectively represented in the social policy model of Oportunidades , renders women supporters of the ends of others—to human development— which may address more adequately women’sown practices and ends.

The relevance of human capabilities to povertyand vulnerability

Human development has been defined and assessed as ‘freedom to be and todo’ by philosophers who have provided a particularly robust theorization onthe meaning and condition of poverty. Drawing on a certain form of ethicalindividualism, this perspective on development is known as the capabilitiesapproach and, in its present form, has been pioneered by Amartya Sen (1985,1999) and further developed by Martha Nussbaum (2000)—see also Robeyns(2005) for an accessible theoretical survey.

Oportunidades ’ operational rules are updated every year, reflecting tosome extent the influence of past criticisms and current development trends.Thus, the Programme is now said to ‘foster the development of capabilities’,seeking:

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to increase the basic capabilities of persons living under conditionsof extreme poverty, facilitating their access to the goods andservices that enable them to acquire the necessary abilities and apti-tudes so that, with their personal effort, they attain a full and self-

sufficient life. (SEDESOL, 2008, p. 3) All this is hard to disagree with, yet it is pertinent to ask whose and whatcapabilities the Programme actually fosters and how. In practice, Opor- tunidades does not facilitate participating mothers’ access to basic serviceslike education, nor does it even address skills as qualifications or educationin its broadest sense. When mentioning ‘the basic capabilities’, the passagequoted above might have acknowledged Nussbaum’s work, for example,although that would have begged an explanation of the exact grounds for theProgramme’s exclusion of women’s affiliation, emotions, senses/imagina-tion/thought, and capability to lead their own life, all of them pointed out ascentral human capabilities by Nussbaum (2000, pp. 70–86 and 156).

During the analysis conducted four years ago (Agudo Sanchíz, 2006), itdid not occur to me to apply the capabilities approach—a broad normativeframework for the assessment of social policies and of such aspects of people’s well-being as inequality or poverty (Robeyns, 2005, pp. 93–94)—tothe evaluation of women’s experiences in Oportunidades . Two centralfeatures of this framework strike me as especially relevant for my presentpurposes. First, the principle that the capabilities—what people are actually able to do and to be, informed by the idea of a life worth of the dignity of thehuman being—constitute a social policy goal that should be pursued for each and every person; as Nussbaum argues, the principle of ‘each person as end’has particular critical force with regard to women, who ‘have all too oftenbeen treated as the supporters of the ends of others, rather than as ends intheir own right’ (2000, pp. 5–6).

Second, the capabilities approach provides a way out of the impoverish-ment of the concept of development, now often reduced to quantifiedtargets for ‘poverty alleviation’. Part of the problem has to do with utilitarian-ism in economics, which translates into a narrow focus on income (Robeyns,2005, p. 99). Income may indeed be important, but only as a means—amongothers—to what intrinsically matters; that is, the freedoms or valuable oppor-

tunities (capabilities) for people to do what they want to do and be whomthey want to be—doings and beings that Amartya Sen calls ‘functionings’. Alongside other insights of the capability approach, this critique against

a narrow focus on income (for overlooking people’s real ends) both echoesand enriches the methodology employed in the Oportunidades ’ qualitativeevaluations—also a significant aspect of programme practice. Taking, as apoint of departure, the Programme’s medium-term and long-term goal of curbing the intergenerational poverty cycle, our research team’s key analyti-cal tool was that of vulnerability . This concept differs from ‘poverty’ in thatthe latter implies static measures carried out according to the (more-or-less

normative) construction of a series of ‘poverty lines’, above or below which

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individuals or groups are situated depending on their monetary incomes at aparticular point in time. Vulnerability, by contrast, is a diachronic conceptthat pertains to the processes generated under conditions of security or inse-curity in the well-being of individuals, households and communities in chang-

ing contexts (Moser, 1996; Kaztman, 1999). The changes affecting well-beingcan be environmental, social or political, taking the form of sudden crises or long-term trends and cycles, and being ‘frequently accompanied by greater risks, uncertainty and a decline in self-esteem’ (Moser, 1998, p. 3). Thesechanges thus have an impact on the processes whereby poor households areable to convert their resources into actual ‘assets’ (both material and intangi-ble) so that they can be employed to lessen vulnerability. For example, work is perhaps the one resource that poor households have abundantly: under conditions of poorly remunerated or unstable employment, domestic groupshave little choice but to send more of their members to the (‘informal sector’of the) labour market (González de la Rocha, 1994, pp. 161–182; AgudoSanchíz, 2006, pp. 398–399). Nonetheless, this particular resource will notbe turned into an asset unless it can be used to obtain wages or in-kind earn-ings, which in turn depends partly on household members’ skills and qualifi-cations (human capital) and on their inclusion in social networks providingcontacts and information necessary to obtain a job.

Domestic relationships are also an important variable here, since their relative equality/inequality and degree of conflict have a bearing on theextent of vulnerability with respect to work incomes and resource allocation,often subject to negotiation and conflict between the sexes and genera-tions—see Nussbaum (2000, pp. 283–290) on ‘bargaining approaches’ to thefamily, and Sen (1990) on the family as a ‘unit of negotiation’; both authorsthus challenge the notion of the family as single entity and call for a moredecided focus on individuals within households. As Nussbaum demonstrates,the family is a ‘plurality of complex social structures’ (2000, p. 270) that both fosters and undermines human capabilities. This becomes especially signifi-cant regarding Nussbaum’s emphasis on capabilities as potential function-ings. Available resources can be understood in this light, enabling us to assesshousehold members’ ability to translate such resources ‘into valuable humanfunctioning’ or functional choices (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 68).

Despite the charge that it focuses excessively on individuals at the

expense of groups and social structures (for a summary of the main criticismsand arguments on the matter, see Robeyns, 2005, pp. 110–114), the capabil-ity approach takes account of the wider social, political and environmentalfactors mentioned above as part of the focus on vulnerability in the Opor- tunidades ’ evaluation. The point is that whether resources and capabilitiesare made to function depends on a variety of factors that, besides govern-ment services, employment opportunities and other wider circumstances,also include personal abilities and qualifications as well as moral, institutionaland individual considerations that may lead individuals to choose not topursue a certain functioning. In this regard, I find Sen’s notion of capability—

primarily as a real or effective opportunity—less useful for my purposes than

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Nussbaum’s, which pays more attention both to people’s skills and personal-ity traits (including women’s own interests and grounds for personal choiceand decision-making).

Let me elaborate further by turning to a key distinction in the capability

approach. This is, namely, the distinction between means (goods, services,income, monetary or in-kind transfers) and capabilities (achievable function-ings), with the latter being turned into achieved functionings through (free-dom of) choice. The relation between means and the capabilities to achievecertain functionings is influenced by three groups of conversion factors(Robeyns, 2005, p. 99): personal (including the ‘human capital’ factors of health, education and skills, but also metabolism, sex, etc.); social (goingbeyond ‘social capital’ components to encompass public policies, socialnorms, gender roles, and power relationships); and environmental (climate,geographical location, etc.).

These conversion factors contribute significant analytical dimensionsand, with hindsight, would have provided a useful tool in the evaluation of Oportunidades to examine the relationships established, through diversehealth and education services and institutions, between the Programme anddifferent types of beneficiary households. The capability approach also goesbeyond ‘what the poor do have’ (Moser, 1998, p. 3) to assess the processes

whereby they mobilize and take advantage of the goods and resources thatthey can use. Nonetheless, such ‘processes’ are more clearly and systemati-cally defined in the form of conversion factors, which enable us to takebetter account of the person and the circumstances in which she is living—including non-material aspects such as social norms and institutions thatinfluence women’s aspirations and their effective choices. Especially usefulin this regard, moreover, is Nussbaum’s concept of ‘combined capabilities’(2000, pp. 83–85), which consist of the ‘internal capabilities’ of a person andthe external provisions that effectively enable that person to exercise aspecific capability. This, in turn, can be related to different types of environ-mental factors and crises affecting vulnerability. An abrupt change in thesocial and political environment may undermine a person’s combined capa-bility and leave only its related internal capability in place—for example, acoup d’état against a democratically-elected regime may put an end to theexternal provisions enabling a person to exercise her internal capability for

freedom of expression.One of the most fruitful characteristics of the capability approach, then,is its attention to human diversity through its focus both on personal andsocio-environmental conversion factors and on the social and institutionalcontexts that affect such factors and the set of achievable functionings. Thisattention to human diversity and the complexity of contexts in which it takesplace is, for the most part, lacking in Oportunidades , as evidenced by theProgramme’s selective evidence and representations of households andfemale roles. As Sen (1992, pp. 81–87) points out, different people needdifferent amounts and different kinds of goods to reach the same levels of

well-being, advantage, or socio-economic mobility. In this light, different

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household formations may have diverse problems, means, and needs regard-ing human capital, which is significantly influenced by considerations of context that are overlooked by the Programme: all beneficiary householdsreceive the same stipends and are compelled in the same way to use public

health and education services, despite the differences in availability, infra-structure, and living expenses between rural and urban settings.I still need to identify the relevant capabilities for the capability

approach to become operational for the purpose at hand; namely, tocompare the experiences and situations of different Mexican women in theProgramme. For my discussion of case studies in the following section, I shalldraw on Nussbaum’s (2000, pp. 70–86) well-known list of central humancapabilities, which most clearly distinguishes her own version of the capabil-ity approach from Sen’s (see also Nussbaum, 2003). However, I will not benecessarily addressing all of Nussbaum’s capabilities in succession in every single case, since—as Nussbaum herself notes—some capabilities are espe-cially significant as they organize and encompass most of the others. More-over, the question of which capabilities to select or to depart from in theanalysis is influenced by the purpose at hand and by the particular social,cultural, and geographical settings, which makes it problematic to endorse apredetermined list of capabilities (Sen, 2004).

Female capabilities and resources in the households with Oportunidades

As Nussbaum argues when presenting her list of central capabilities, theseare valuable in themselves rather than just having a merely instrumentalcharacter for further purposes. The capability of being in good health, for example, is an end in itself as it makes life fully human, although it is also ameans to the capability to work. Thus, the analytical distinction betweenmeans and ends—key in the capabilities approach—can prove less fruitfulthan focusing on how different capabilities are actually interrelated in diverseand complex ways. As I mentioned earlier, apart from personal conversionfactors partially covered by the ‘human capital’ variable (individual skills,good health), work requires opportunities provided by broader, social and

environmental factors such as networks, policies and labour markets to comeinto action as an asset—which echoes Nussbaum’s notion of combined capabilities . These external provisions are partly included in the notion of ‘socialcapital’ and can be deepened by focusing on affiliation (the seventh capabil-ity on Nussbaum’s list), which involves being capable of engaging in differentforms of social interaction, protecting norms and institutions that foster such interaction, and entering into relationships of reciprocal acknowledgement

with other workers.The capability for affiliation thus acquires especial significance as it

encompasses most of the other capabilities, making its pursuit truly human

(Nussbaum, 2000, p. 83). When choosing particular capabilities for the

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analysis, then, the main purpose to bear in mind is to examine how such capa-bilities involve others in diverse ways. For my own analysis in 2006, I pickedup social networks as a point of departure and then examined their conflu-ence with work and domestic relationships in processes of accumulation of

(dis)advantages (Agudo Sanchíz, 2006). As illustrated by the cases presentedbelow, horizontal networks of social exchange—consisting especially of rela-tives, neighbours, and friends—constitute resources that are normally mobi-lized in situations of crisis or vulnerability where the Oportunidades cash transfers can merely contribute to buttressing short-term livelihood strategiesaimed at daily survival (e.g. employing stipends, including scholarships, tomainly buy food). This restricted use of the Programme’s benefits is due to a

variety of vulnerability factors, among them the precariousness or absence of quality employment. As I also mentioned earlier, such situation may promptthe participation of women and children in income-generating activities,

which questions and erodes ‘traditional’ gender and family roles and may havea significant bearing on intra-household power relationships—based onconstant confrontation and negotiation around resource allocation.

Robust social networks can compensate for precarious resources and for conflictive domestic relationships, yet the confluence of all these may takeplace in diverse and complex ways. Based on reciprocity, networks of horizontal exchange require a sufficient base of resources (among themtime ) enabling one to return favours, to keep relationships with neighboursover time, or to leave one’s locality to visit distant relatives and friends. Thoseunable to afford such practices are more likely to be pushed further into

vertical links with groups in socio-economically or politically superior posi-tions, as well as into prolonged dependence on state programmes likeOportunidades —the opposite of the advantageous spiral by which beneficia-ries are supposed to help themselves out of poverty.

The personal and household trajectories presented below—discussed in Agudo Sanchíz (2006, pp. 414–426) and re-examined here in the light of thecapabilities approach—illustrate women’s survival strategies in processes of escalating disadvantages related to unequal gender relationships that are only partially addressed by Oportunidades . In asking ‘what are women in thesehouseholds really capable of being and doing?’, therefore, I will consider social conversion factors such as public policy, gender roles and power rela-

tionships, focusing initially on three combined capabilities on Nussbaum’slist (‘combined’, that is, in the sense of requiring both personal states andexternal provisions enabling to exercise the capability): affiliation, control over one’s environment , and bodily health . The key question here is whatcompels individual choice, which leads us to recognize the constraints in

women’s lives and to examine vulnerability spirals where the absence of onecapability erodes others. Thus, the capability for affiliation includes not justdiverse forms of social interaction, but also the capability of being treated likea dignified being whose value is equal to that of others, which implies protec-tion against discrimination and being able to work as a human being; this, in

turn, involves the right to seek employment on a basis of equality with others

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(control over one’s material environment), which enables both adequatenourishment and dwelling (bodily health). The question, again, is not just tolook at available resources, but also to examine how (and whether) such resources can come into action to enable these women to function in a fully

human manner.Let us then introduce Antonia. Separated from her husband since early 2002, illiterate and 43 years old, she is the head of a household with sixchildren—the youngest of them is still a baby. Marco Antonio (13 years old)is the eldest of them and, after dropping out of school, works with an uncleas a carpenter’s apprentice, although neither this uncle nor Marco Antoniocontributes any earnings to the household. Antonia has four other childrenfrom whom she receives no support at all—two of them have set up their own households, while the other two are in jail for unspecified reasons. Mostof the household’s incomes—spent almost exclusively on food—come from

Antonia’s work, selling homemade snacks two or three times a week. Antonia’s weekly earnings fluctuate between 50 and 200 pesos (approxi-mately $4–19), although her sales diminish substantially at harvest times,

when neighbours have their own maize. Incorporated into Oportunidades in2001, Antonia was excluded from the Programme in March 2002, since shestopped fulfilling her co-responsibilities as she moved with her children to aranching property where she worked as a caretaker for three months. As theranch employment ended, Antonia returned to Arteaga, her native town inMichoacán, and went back to working as a street vendor. When Antonialeaves home for work, her daughter Hermelinda (11 years old) looks after her

younger siblings, so on such occasions she cannot attend school. The worstcomes when Antonia falls ill and cannot work, in which case she is helpedby Consuelo, a friend of hers. There seems to be no one else to fall back onand Antonia’s neighbours are not very helpful: ‘sometimes I buy on credit atthe shop but then I cannot buy more than two things at a time and I have topay for them within two days … and my children sometimes are left with nofood’. Benito, Antonia’s husband, visits her occasionally—although never togive her money from his earnings as a day labourer on a nearby ranch.

Antonia cannot even benefit from her husband’s social networks: the houseshe occupies was lent to Benito by a friend of his, and now that Benito nolonger lives there Antonia was told that the owner would soon come to

reclaim his property. A very precarious dwelling, the house comprises only two rooms and has no basic services or equipment. Antonia has had to do ‘what countless women in developing countries

routinely do’; namely, ‘to shoulder all the burden of raising and caring for chil-dren, and running a household with children, while working a full day at ademanding job’ (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 108). Yet Antonia has done generally

worse than others on many of the measures of capability, which we can exam-ine by first focusing on affiliation and then seeing how closely it is linked toother capabilities. Antonia’s exclusion from robust social networks—partly asa result of moving home several times—has curtailed her possibilities for both

spiritual and material well-being, something that has in turn been worsened

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by the lack of basic or starting resources. To fully understand Antonia’sincreasing vulnerability, we thus need also to focus on the ‘mundane mattersof property, employment, and credit’ that Nussbaum sees as playing a largerole in women’s personal choices and freedom (2000, p. 106). Antonia has

no savings and holds no property in her own name—her access to a precari-ous dwelling, gained through her husband, is especially insecure after hedeserted the household. If Antonia’s little control over her material environ-ment is partly a consequence of her lack of affiliation, it has also been wors-ened by unequal family and domestic relationships, since she has nosupportive male relatives. These are actually more of a liability than an assetand Antonia’s only resort in case of need is her friend Consuelo.

Lacking basic literacy and employment-related skills—included in thecapability for senses, imagination and although on Nussbaum’s list—

Antonia’s choice for exercising her capability to work has been confined toan unstable job that does not afford a sufficient income to guarantee adequatenourishment for her and her dependent children. She has to worry constantly about hunger and her children suffer from malnutrition and poor hygienicconditions, living mostly on rice and corn tortillas .

Let us turn to another case. Now aged 75 and with serious health prob-lems, Gregoria was for a long time the head of a household that currently comprises just two more people: her son Juan (45 years old) and, since May 2005, her brother Rubén—aged 70 and completely blind, which makes himheavily dependent on Gregoria and Juan. Gregoria’s start in life was similar to

Antonia’s: abandoned by her husband 35 years ago and with no literacy andno employment-related skills, Gregoria was forced to work hard for raisingher seven children, which she did by selling home-cooked meals to thepassengers of a train that used to stop daily at Paredón, the town where shelives in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Since the cancellation of therailway line in 2000, Gregoria came to depend increasingly on earningsprovided by Juan, who worked in a local brick factory until 2004 (earning450 pesos a week). When the factory was closed down, Juan was forced toseek work elsewhere, although his jobs have typically been unstable andpoorly remunerated—rural labour, street vending, and so forth. We see herehow the fluctuating structure of employment opportunities is beyond thehousehold members’ control; nonetheless, Gregoria and her son’s capability

for work has been relatively enabled by geographical location (a key environ-mental conversion factor), since the more industrialized and economically dynamic north of the country provides a significant contrast with respect to

Antonia’s vulnerable position in Arteaga. Moreover, control over the materialenvironment is not totally absent in this case, since Gregoria’s house is notsquatted or lent and she does not have to face the uncertainty of beingsubject to dispossession at any moment.

The household’s social exchange relations are mostly restricted to family links, which, however, are very significant in themselves as the householdincome is complemented by more-or-less regular contributions in cash or in

kind coming from Gregoria’s absent children: two daughters send food and a

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son sends money earned through his job as a construction worker inMonterrey City. If we also bear in mind Juan’s permanence in thehousehold—which guarantees some social security for both Gregoria and her also elderly brother—we see that Gregoria’s children are reciprocating in

different ways for all the attention they got from her when they were small.

Oportunidades and women’s ‘lot in life’

If we return to the question of policy and practice and the relationshipbetween representation and reality in development, we see that the casespresented above show domestic scenarios and processes that differ from theOportunidades Programme’s policy narrative and its implicit nuclear, bi-parental household type. Antonia is a single mother and head of a household

where she provides for five (undernourished) children, for which she optedfor a job that forced her to relinquish the Oportunidades Programme.Gregoria used to head a household that now includes an elderly and incapac-itated member (her brother Rubén) and the unstable headship of her son

Juan, a situation that never had a chance of rectification through theProgramme’s aid—being initially found to be in ‘extreme poverty’, Gregoria’shousehold qualified for Oportunidades but had no children of school age tobenefit from the Programme’s scholarships.

It is striking to notice how the Programme has failed to address many basic capabilities of participating mothers, reinforcing in a way the gender inequalities that are at the root of their lack of autonomy, education, andemployment-related skills. In a certain sense, Antonia’s household is acontemporary reproduction of the vulnerable situation confronted by Gregoria 30 years earlier: a woman deserted by her husband and in charge of a household with numerous small children for whose upbringing she mustresort to informalized, subsistence-oriented petty production and trade.

These comparisons—including a diachronic component enabling us toaddress issues of longer-term vulnerability—are best made within the frame-

work provided by the capability approach. The presence of such combinedcapabilities as bodily health, affiliation, and control over one’s environment

will make it possible to compare one woman with another, benefiting at the

same time from the added value of this human development paradigm toevaluate policies according to their impact on those capabilities—that is,according to their intentionality and degree of success in ensuring beneficia-ries a basic level of capability.

To apply the capability approach in the two inextricably linked areasof comparison and policy evaluation, we can return to the policy logic of Oportunidades . Such logic revolves importantly around the conception of the family as a single or organic entity where important values of personalchoice are sacrificed (for a highly relevant discussion, see Nussbaum, 2000,pp. 257–261ff.). However, the family is not a natural growth, but a plurality

of complex social structures that ‘house and further shape, in turn, gender

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roles in the area of care and love that are themselves in many respects socialartefacts’ (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 270).

This has significant implications for the focus on the family as a subjectof policy when programme implementation draws on women’s ‘traditional’

role as housewives and child-carers. As I mentioned earlier, Oportunidades ’instrumental model might seem partly justified by evidence of women’smoral capabilities to perceive their children’s needs and sacrifice their owninterests in favour of others. However, we should expect policy to addressthe family in a more general way, taking account of those complex socialstructures that shape roles within such an allegedly private sphere of femalelove and care. Asking more of women in this respect obscures the reasons

why we cannot supposedly ask more of men, which pertains to differentforms of domestic violence and unequal healthcare and education opportuni-ties. In both intentionality and relative success, the OportunidadesProgramme addresses such imbalances in the case of children of school age,

yet it mostly skips the broader problem of the family as a site of oppressionand reproduction of inequalities that affect women of different generations.

Let us illustrate this with a third case. For Marisela, a 32-year-old womanliving in the outskirts of Tuxtla (Chiapas’ capital city), the household hasbeen a place of abuse and iniquity under the effects of her unfaithfulhusband’s alcoholism, which has put her four children at risk and has deep-ened her dependent status with respect to her in-laws. The latter’s moral andfinancial support is directed mainly to Marisela’s children, which reinforcesthe role allocated to her by the Oportunidades Programme as a medium for the well-being of others. Physically distant from her blood relatives in ruralChiapas, and lacking education and employment, Marisela’s main hope in themedium term is that support from both the Programme and her in-laws canbe maintained while her children grow up and, eventually, replace her husband in his (faulty) role as the main bread-winner in the household.

This brings us back again to the issue of dependence on delayed reci-procity from adult children, often one of the few assets to which women canresort as old age nears. Unlike Gregoria, the oldest of the women presentedhere, middle-aged Antonia is very far from being able to benefit from this kindof reciprocity—with increasing vulnerability stemming from the absence of support from the public sector after Antonia’s discharge from Oportunidades .

This case shows many of the features that characterize poor single-parent,female-headed domestic groups, where gender vulnerability adds up to class vulnerability (González de la Rocha, 1994, p. 32). Thus, we see that theconstraints affecting these women are significantly related to a particular formof oppression within the family, where the script of their lives have been writ-ten by others—often men—for them to perform as child-carers and domesticservants in their own households, rather than as sources of capabilities tochoose their own ends. Their husbands, brothers and sons, by contrast, canrely on such ‘traditional’ female roles to pursue their own aims (e.g. seekingemployment through migration) within a relatively less reduced capability

threshold.

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The lack of support and delayed reciprocity from others—especially husbands and sons—in Antonia’s case, moreover, casts light on a perverseaspect of ‘intergenerational reproduction of poverty’ that is unscripted in theOportunidades policy narrative. In very significant respects, the family does

reproduce what it contains, including gender inequality and patterns of education and child-rearing that generate households with similar profilesand also influence the wider social and political world. It is in this light thatpolicies directed to the family have also to be evaluated, including their strong component of social and cultural ‘engineering’ aimed, in turn, at modi-fying the behaviour of beneficiaries and their closest relatives.

In some important aspects, Oportunidades ’ cash transfers do have apositive influence on men’s attitudes to women, something that may improvethe latter’s capabilities for control over their material environment and for basic education and literacy. On the one hand, participating mothers cancount on a regular stipend that makes them reliable as subjects of credit tothe eyes of both local storeowners and relatives, something that in turn hasa positive bearing on affiliation. Marisela’s capacity to reciprocate for her in-laws’ favours is limited, although she can at least eventually return money loans thanks to the Programme’s transfers and the irregular contributions of her husband. On the other hand, fathers can come to see that their daughters‘are worth’ on account of their bigger scholarships, which may be an impor-tant factor in the decision to keep girls in school beyond primary education.

However, boys educated to regard their mothers as supporters of their own and their fathers’ well-being will tend to reproduce this view in adultlife. In a more general way, it is unlikely that people will treat women asequals and as ends in themselves if they have been brought up to perceivethem as tools, as child-bearers and carers, and as administrators of the others’‘human capital’. We see that this learning within the household is reinforcedby broader factors such as state intervention through policy, which in thecase of Oportunidades tends to reproduce the view of mothers as unworthy of their own choices regarding the capabilities for imagination, thought,emotions, and control over their own material environment through the rightto seek employment on a basis of equality with others.

In fact, in a somewhat disciplinary manner, the choice left to participat-ing mothers may be whether to keep the Programme’s support by behaving

according to their ‘traditional’ role, on the one hand, or to pursue their ownmeans of survival, on the other. Perhaps the most vulnerable woman of allthose presented here, Antonia (who spent only one year as a beneficiary before being struck off Oportunidades owing to her failure to fulfil the co-responsibilities) had to make such a choice when she found the Programme’said to be less convenient than the regular earnings from a job that, unfortu-nately and against her plans, lasted only for three months (‘what I want is a

job to support myself’, she said to the researcher). This accumulation of disadvantages is further aggravated by Antonia’s social isolation and/or inclusion in non-reciprocal relationships. If education and capabilities for

work are important as aspects of ‘human capital’, then we have a reason to

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worry about how the family conducts itself with respect to every single oneof their members and not just with respect to some of them.

The cases presented here show that a fully human functioning requiresaffiliation and reciprocity with others. In this respect, we may also examine

how Oportunidades affects other forms of affiliation beyond the family. None-theless, the links of exchange and cooperation between participating mothersare mostly activated for collective work, when they are compelled by localauthorities and service providers to contribute a set amount of hours to clear-ing rubbish or cleaning public spaces. Such tasks are not formally part of theOportunidades ’ co-responsibilities, but the collective pressure put exclu-sively on beneficiary women to perform them may contribute to their view that the Programme ‘isn’t worth’. Moreover, we see that the potential advan-tages of being part of a mutually supportive community do not apply in thecases of Gregoria (now too old for fulfilling the Programme’s co-responsibil-ities) and Antonia (no longer included in the Programme). In Marisela’s case,reciprocal forms of affiliation are much less present than vertical relationshipsand dependence on both the Programme’s aid and on better-off relatives.

This, in turn, relates to the affiliation needs and the capabilities of each person, which we need to bear in mind when asking how public policy couldaffect the family. Policy should of course pay particular attention to this or any other institution having a significant influence on the formation of capa-bilities, but only if it advances the principle of each person as end: thisrequires a rejection of the persistent view of women as part of an ‘organicentity’ rather than as political subjects in their own right (Nussbaum, 1999;2000, pp. 257–264). In terms of the Oportunidades Programme’s policy andpractice, this has meant targeting partly the distribution of resources but notthe distribution of opportunities within the family. An emphasis on the rightsand entitlements of participating mothers with respect to the household’smen would have been significant in promoting more fruitful and less exploit-ative forms of family affiliation and support. A policy focus on people’s capa-bilities for choosing whether or not to pursue particular forms of affiliation,in sum, has important implications for public policy and social developmentin terms of marriage consent and rights, public support for childcare, andprovision after divorce or separation.

So far the discussion has privileged affiliation and control over one’s

own environment, yet I must now briefly examine other related capabilitiessuch as thought, emotion, and practical reason—involving women’s aspira-tions, self-esteem, and reflections on their own situations. By failing to realizethe extent to which history, laws, and social norms shape female capabilitiesfor care and love, we might run the risk of regarding as undesirable any attempt to stave off the traditional patterns that perpetuate the role of

women—as unrewarded providers of support for others—within many diverse family structures and types of households. This is precisely the cruxof Nussbaum’s critique of natural deterministic views on women’s traditionalfunctions (2000, pp. 264-270), which may hinder effective policy attempts at

modifying the beliefs underpinning cultural constructions of gender roles.

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What the women referenced above said about their respective situationsin the family shows that they may have actually internalized such normativebeliefs, which shape both their actions and their emotions. In Marisela’s case,

we find the belief that it is part of a woman’s lot to endure a great deal of

abuse from an unfaithful husband, as well as the belief that children are animportant source of protection from increasing female vulnerability. Signifi-cantly, this involves livelihood strategies that do not necessarily require theinvestment in schooling supposedly stimulated by Oportunidades : Marisela

wishes her children:

to learn since very little to work in construction with their grand-parents, also to learn how to raise chicken, … a part-time job is fineand at the age of 15 or 16 they can work in construction or clearingrubbish, they have to look for a job like that.

In Antonia’s case, we find the assumption that her duty is to perform allhousehold chores, or instruct her 11-year-old daughter Hermelinda toperform them, even when she worked cooking and selling meals as much asher husband did before their separation; Antonia also seems to take for granted that her income must support the whole family while her adult sons’belongs only to themselves.

Conclusions: implications for policy and practice

During the analysis carried out in 2006 by our qualitative evaluation team, theconcept of vulnerability threw light on the complexities and difficultiesexisting between the Oportunidades ’ model and the social contexts of itsimplementation, revealing particular correlations between diverse factors of

vulnerability and domestic resources that could enable households to realizein some way the Programme’s objectives. For a social studies approach topolicy, a key lesson to learn from such analyses is that the ‘success’ of devel-opment programmes owes much to a convincing technical problem-solution,based on ‘empirical evidence’ and offered by causal models that relate aid tooutcomes in a simple and direct manner (Mosse, 2005, pp. 36–37). Some

empirical evidence actually points not only to the greater ‘reliability’ of women as administrators of resources in favour of their domestic groups, butalso to the relation between Oportunidades and new local views of greater female rights and dignity (Maldonado et al. , 2005, p. 38). Other studies,however, point to ‘critical age’ households (e.g. those comprising mainly or exclusively children and the elderly) and female-headed households, which are characterized by a diminished income-generating capacity and by signifi-cant incompatibilities between women’s role as bread-winners and the fulfil-ment of their ‘co-responsibilities’ as housewives and child-carers (Gonzálezde la Rocha, 2006). Such situations further reveal household desertion,

withdrawal of male monetary contributions, and violence against women,

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highlighting the negative effects of the confluence between irresponsiblepaternity and the maternalist bias of the Oportunidades Programme.

The planners of Oportunidades seem actually to struggle with adilemma regarding the incorporation of gender into the Programme’s model.

On the one hand, a ‘gender focus’ provides significant legitimacy at the(national and international) political and institutional levels; on the other hand, however, this legitimacy and consensus can be maintained only through a selective narrative of specific problems, opportunities, and aimsthat finds its logical source in largely unquestioned and persistent construc-tions of female roles and capabilities within the family. Thus, gender inequal-ity is present in the Programme in certain ways (educational discriminationagainst girls) but not in others (constraints on mothers to develop their ownskills and pursue their own needs).

Oportunidades ’ failure to address key female capabilities is thus linkedto naturalized constructions of gender roles within families and households.In treating each person as an end and seeking development for each and every person, the capability approach can help us identify the cultural and socialsources of certain practices, something that in this case may aid in dispelling‘the false sense of inevitability that so often surrounds questions of gender andfamily’ and thus in addressing the issue of reform (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 270).Policy reform could therefore start by enabling everyone’s choice with regardto key functionings—rather than presuppose the need to keep sacrificingsuch choice in the case of certain family members. In accordance with theprinciples of ethical individualism and personal freedom espoused by thecapability approach—and against the principles of utilitarianism, ‘rationality’,and cost-effectiveness that guide managerial-instrumental policy models—development interventions must ensure options regardless of whether peopleexercise them or not. An additional key issue for policy, then, is to identify and act upon the environmental, social, economic, cultural, and politicalfactors that impede such options. In contexts characterized by substantialequality in education and employment opportunities, women may choose tostay at home and find pride and satisfaction in childcare; this, however, mustnot lead governments to undervalue female capabilities and productive assets,

which come into action in significant ways in situations of crisis, diminishedemployment opportunities, and withdrawal of public social benefits. Not a

few women in the Oportunidades ’ evaluations expressed their hopes to helpthemselves out of poverty and vulnerability, something that could be aidedby schemes aimed at literacy, education, and professional training for partic-ipating mothers. The Mexican government has timidly developed some such schemes, which, unfortunately, have neither the coverage nor the budget of Oportunidades . Nonetheless, the Programme might condition its cash trans-fers to the fulfilment of co-responsibilities by fathers, including shared respon-sibility for their children’s attendance at school and at health workshops—sothat they stop being ways of monitoring mothers’ supposedly exclusiveresponsibility for their children’s well-being. Regardless of the existence of

children of school age in beneficiary households, co-responsibilities could

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also be directed to adult schooling in coordination with public secondary andhigh schools and with the already existing Mexican Institute for Adult’sEducation. The situation of women engaged in small-scale household formsof production, however, will not be substantially improved unless national

states fully recognize and address their responsibility in the incorporation of petty commodification, something that could take the form of initiatives such as the Self-Employed Women’s Association—the organization that aids Indian

women working in the so-called ‘informal sector’ through credit, education,and a trade union (Nussbaum, 2000, pp. 15–16ff.; Rose, 1993).

This last observation may finally lead us to ask how well equipped thecapability approach is to account for social structures and institutions. Wehave seen that the approach’s concern for affiliation and collectives leaves noground for arguing that it does not pay sufficient attention to groups(Robeyns, 2005). Nonetheless, there is a set of broader problems of policy implementation that need to be acknowledged in addition: for example, therole of international development policy and its largely unquestioned partner-ship with the free market (and the values it promotes), which are among thediverse social forces that compel affiliation and frame individual choices (Vanden Anker, 2001; Ambrosio, 2001). As Ambrosio argues, Nussbaum does notdirectly address these issues, eliding them instead by hoping that the moralclaims embodied in the capabilities list will somehow ‘steer the process of globalization’ (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 105, cited in Ambrosio, 2001; the websitedoes not provide page numbers). Likewise, Harriss-White (2007, p. 2) arguesthat—in their focus on individuals’ well-being, rights and freedom—Sen andNussbaum risk losing the connection to the institutional framework anddynamic of capitalism. Harriss-White draws our attention to the reduction of development to a mere assault on poverty, apparently driven by internationalaid and neoliberal schemes of privatization and structural adjustment. None-theless, she argues, poverty cannot be eliminated, since it is not possible toeradicate the processes that (re)create poverty under capitalism.

Two such processes are petty commodification and pauperising crises, which significantly affect the lives of Mexican women like Gregoria and Antonia. Let us consider how capital and public policy invade their domestic work (alongside their physical and emotional needs) by transforming it intopaid-for services. Consider these women’s exchange relations, the super-

exploitation of their household labour, and the denial of their access to state-regulated incentives, all of which prevent accumulation (unwaged petty production being the alternative to low wages) and preserve the supply of labour to a low-wage service sector (see also Harriss-White, 2005). Pauper-ized petty commodity production and trade, apparently outside state-regulated capitalism, may then be intrinsic to and incorporated by it—andeven intentionally developed as they bring significant advantages to businessand the state. Regulative and welfare responsibilities towards this type of (gendered) labour can be shed by avoiding the conditions where it might beorganized in unions, shifting market or environmental risks onto unprotected

homeworkers, and reducing costs by replacing wage work with family work

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regulated through norms associated with religion and gender (Harriss-White,2007, pp. 6–7). As Harriss-White concludes, a developmental state focusedon reducing poverty would need to promote the opposite of all these prac-tices, yet this becomes difficult if we consider that the proliferation of

informalized, subsistence-oriented petty production and trade are among theresults of economic crises. Partly induced by falls in the prices of exportcommodities (on coercively liberalized product markets), such crises requireaid that is conditioned by international financial institutions on the adoptionof austerity measures. These, in turn, compromise the capacity of the state tohelp the poor, which in the case of Mexico is aggravated by fiscal deficit andlimited government initiatives to broaden the tax base. In sum, these aresome of the more fundamental development issues often obscured by current policy strategies; it is perhaps time we questioned the impoverish-ment of the concept of development itself, shifting our focus from poverty alleviation to wealth redistribution.

Acknowledgements A preliminary version of this paper was delivered at the Poverty and CapitalConference, the University of Manchester, 4 July 2007. I would like to thank Lucy Ferguson and the three anonymous Journal of Human Development Capabilities reviewers for their insightful comments. I am also indebted tothe Dirección de Investigación (DINV) at the Universidad Iberoamericana for financial support. All translations from Spanish are my own.

Notes1 Oportunidades is subject to regular—both quantitative and qualitative—external evalua-

tions that were planned since the Programme’s very inception (see, for example, Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha, 2004). The most systematic qualitative evaluations werecarried out, since 1999/2000, by a team of social researchers affiliated to the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), which I joined in 2005. Theresults of the evaluations are available on the website (http://evaluacion.opor-tunidades.gob.mx:8010/index2.php?a=768).

2 This new focus was actually stimulated by the evaluation’s change in character during2006. In that year, the qualitative evaluation team’s aim was to depart from the logic of theconsultancy study and produce instead an analytical work on the relationships between

Oportunidades and the social and economic organization of beneficiary households (seeGonzález de la Rocha, 2006). Both this analysis and the evaluation research conducted in2005, 2007 and 2008 were funded by the Inter-American Development Bank via the Opor- tunidades Programme.

3 During a meeting with our evaluation team, Oportunidades ’ officials recognized thatgender had been a matter of intense debate within the Programme, yet, they assured us,they would have never expressed publicly a ‘gender aim’ for fear of ‘getting ourselves intotrouble’. The results of an audit of the Programme’s gender effects have recently beenpublished (López and Salles, 2006).

4 Oportunidades ’ declared objective is to curb the intergenerational poverty cycle in all households in ‘extreme poverty’, yet it is important to examine which domestic scenariosare particularly suited to the fulfilment of the Programme’s requirements and to the gener-

ation of advantages resulting from its conditional transfers. Very significantly, after dismiss-

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ing my argument about the ‘ideal’ household implicit in the Oportunidades ’ operationalguidelines, a Programme official naively asked me: ‘isn’t that rather the type of householdin which people would take better advantage of the Programme’s aid?’

5 For the analysis carried out in 2006, we revised 252 case studies resulting from the quali-tative-ethnographic evaluations of Oportunidades conducted between 2001 and 2005.

Fifty-seven of those 252 cases corresponded to female-headed households—where, regard-less of male presence and declared headship, women had been found to contribute thegreatest and/or the most regular earnings. This actually came close to national-level data,

with 23% of female-headed households being reported in Mexico for 2005 (ConsejoNacional de Población [CONAPO], 2007). In a rather conservative manner, the CONAPOreport attributes this to ‘separation, divorce and widowhood’, so we may presume thereto be a higher rate of female headship than that yielded by the use of the male-biased crite-rion of ‘single-female parent household’. On the other hand, 136 of our 252 cases werehouseholds at the dispersion stage of the domestic cycle. That stage starts with the end of reproductive age (around 40 years in the case of women) and is characterized by the lossof young productive members through marriage and migration. This factor of greater

vulnerability is deepened by the fact that many households in dispersion comprise exclu-sively elderly adults who are unable to work or to sustain themselves. Mexican single-member households amounted to 7.6% in 2005, with as much as 44% of them comprisingadults aged 60 or over; this situation is more frequent among women—three out of fivehouseholds show those characteristics (CONAPO, 2007).

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opportunities for the poor, co‐responsibilities for women: female capabilities and vulnerability...

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