Proyecto Capital: More on CCTs and Savings from Latin America

I’ve blogged about conditional cash transfers (CCTs) before, but when I opened my inbox yesterday morning to find an email notifying me of Proyecto Capital‘s website launch, I couldn’t help but keep writing about it.

Proyecto Capital is a regional initiative (affiliated with the Global Assets Project) that seeks to support governments within Latin America and the Caribbean in the design, implementation, and evaluation of savings-linked conditional cash transfer (CCT) policies, with the goal of facilitating the enhancement and protection of the poor, primarily through asset building.

Their Puno-Cusco Corridor Development Project is highlighted in a forthcoming paper co-authored by my colleague Jamie Zimmerman and Proyecto Capital Director Yves Moury.

As the paper explores the potential of linking CCTs with savings and asset building, it examines the Puno-Cusco project-a CCT initiative of the Peruvian government affiliated with Proyecto Capital that links rural women with savings accounts. A recent evaluation of the project demonstrates that, while there are challenges associated with expanding access to financial services (particularly savings) to low-income, rural women, they indeed do save and the element of empowerment that emerges is not insignificant.

Taking a look at initiatives that explicitly link CCTs with savings-such as the Puno-Cusco Project, or Oportunidades’s youth savings program (Jóvenes con Oportunidades)-and examining existing CCT programs that could potentially link to savings, Zimmerman and Moury argue that the time is ripe to link CCTs to savings as a two-pronged strategy of supplementing income and building productive assets, while facilitating the financial inclusion of the poor.

The literature and evidence on CCTs and savings is still slim, but in the meanwhile, keep an eye out for their paper in the coming weeks– one that will surely add to a small but growing discourse on the evolving nature of CCTs.