Schoolgirls in the streets of Pune, India (photo: Adam Cohn/Flickr.com)
Similarly, welfare provision through cash transfers – a type of initiative through which LRGs can contribute directly to indicator 1.A.1 on the proportion of resources the government allocates to poverty reduction programmes – is becoming an increasingly common tool in a wide range of countries, including middle-income countries. These interventions increase purchasing power via income transfers, make insurance and risk protection schemes affordable, or allow for more investment and foster local entrepreneurship. Local governments can often make these transfer conditional upon meeting certain social requirements: children attending school, families having regular health check-ups, etc. The Bolsa Familia and Bolsa Escola programmes in Brazilian cities (both initiatives, more over rewarded the inclusion of women in the programme and were also catalysts of gender equality); the Medellín Solidaria initiative in the Colombian city; and the cash-transfer programme Oportunidades in Mexico City are valuable examples of this kind of tool.62 Addressing urban policy at its core: planning, slum renovation and housing policies In many of the reporting countries, the fight against poverty remains inextricably interlinked with access to land property and tenure, as well as with the level of formalization of such rights. The ability to formally and securely own land (or participate in collective property frameworks)63 is a fundamental condition for accessing rights, services and the overall protection of the socio-economic system. Unsecure, unstable or informal tenure compromises tax revenue, public control of service provision, as well as equality, inclusion and participation across communities and population.
62 It is worth noting that Oportunidades was an adaptation of the pre-existing rural initiative Progresa to the urban context. The impact of the programme was overestimated due to inadequate consideration of contextual variables: transit, food and logistics can be more expensive in urban contexts, especially for single-parent households. Ultimately, even if the conditional cash-transfer programme had positive spill-overs in other areas (more investment in urban renovation and housing safety, for instance), the impact on school enrolments, completion and drop out were smaller than in rural areas. 63 Communal systems of land tenure are still extremely common in many regions of the world, e.g., in Sub-Saharan Africa, where “the majority of land holdings are based on customary forms of tenure”, often described as traditional, tribal or indigenous systems, but not only: in Mexico, for example, 47% of all land is still tenured as ejidos, common lands that are generally used for communal purposes (pasture, infrastructure, etc.). See UN-Habitat and GLTN (2016) Leveraging Land: Land-based Finance for Local Governments, GLTN, available online at this address: http://www.gltn.net/index.php/publications/publications/download/2-gltn-documents/2350-leveraging-land-land-basedfinance-for-local-governments-a-reader.
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