Giving Compass' Take:

• In this excerpt from her book Unjust Conditions, Tara Patricia Cookson explains how conditional cash transfers like the Juntos program in Peru can create conditions for abuse in the communities the program aims to improve. 

• How can funders prevent financial abuse, especially among women who usually bear the brunt of unpaid labor? 

• Learn about the cost of gender inequality. 

When witty, twenty-six-year-old Josepa was pregnant with the second of two children, she was abandoned by her husband for a younger woman.

In order to receive Juntos’s monthly payment of one hundred soles ($35 US dollars), mothers like Josepa were required to meet a standard set of seemingly reasonable conditions. These included attendance at prenatal exams, children’s regular growth-and-nutrition checkups until the age of five, and school attendance with fewer than three absences per month until eighteen years of age or graduation.

Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork with women in the Andes, I discovered that the practice of providing and earning a cash incentive did not play out exactly as policy makers intended. Juntos recipients like Josepa were made to believe that their coresponsibilities extended far beyond the reasonable set of conditions laid out in official policy documents.

In addition to the work of ordinary mothers required to manage up, local managers also relied on the organized labor of a group of “exemplary” Juntos recipients called Mother Leaders. Local managers referred to these women as “the local managers in their communities.” The work of Mother Leaders bore a surprising resemblance to the job descriptions that program headquarters had written for local managers. The Mother Leaders, however, were not paid for their contributions. Here was yet another gendered cost, hidden between the line items of Juntos’s administrative budget. If not for Mother Leaders, the state would have been required to hire many, many more local managers. The unpaid labor of these women subsidized the cost of implementing Peru’s largest social program, which development experts hold up as a “model for the world.”

On paper, conditionality seems like a simple technical arrangement. Yet in the real world of unequal resources and social hierarchies, a well-intended incentive can unravel into a coercive exercise of authority. Once Juntos arrived in the places it was meant to improve, conditionality became a tool for more authoritative groups to exercise power over subordinate groups. Experts in Lima intended for Juntos mothers to meet a strict schedule of health and education conditions, and they did. But they also complied with a host of additional directives put in place by Juntos’s frontline staff and other local authorities. These “shadow conditions” were enforced through threats of suspension and accusations of irresponsible motherhood.

Read the full article about Juntos by Tara Patricia Cookson at Stanford Social Innovation Review.