[1] It is designed to target poverty by providing cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutrition support.
Other countries that have instituted similar conditional cash transfer programs include Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Jamaica, Chile, Malawi and Zambia.
Although this provided for an easier and faster startup, it also meant that many of the related agency structures, which Progresa-Oportunidades would have to rely on for its sustainability, were incompatible with the new program.
However, the lack of community participation in the identification of beneficiaries and the allocation of funding helps to limit the opportunities for corruption at the local level, which has traditionally been a problem with such government-funded programs.
Secondly, information was provided to Congress and other government officials at all levels in the form of detailed budget proposals, program evaluations, and other relevant documents.
Although Oportunidades originally was no different in its dependence on Zedillo to support its startup costs, much effort has since been made to establish an image of Progresa-Oportunidades as independent of the president and national party politics, in order to heighten chances it would survive transfers of power in the executive branch.
In addition, budget provisions have been enacted that attempt to directly communicate with beneficiaries to educate them about rights and responsibilities regarding the program.
President Fox’s administration achieved early public recognition for its commitment to anti-poverty strategies as well as its willingness to continue with earlier initiatives that had proved to be successful.
Fox ultimately decided to continue with the program because its independent image meant that it had not become identified with the old ruling party (the PRI) or with former President Zedillo in the eyes of the public.
Since 2002, the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Public Health Institute, INSP) and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, CIESAS) have been responsible for carrying out ongoing evaluations of both program operations and impact.
[citation needed] Communications between IFPRI and Progresa's leadership commenced in late 1997,[7] with the final contract ($2.5 million USD)[8] signed during the third quarter of 1998.
"[15] According to the bulk of literature describing IFPRI-Progresa, the project was the first large-scale social policy evaluation implemented in a ‘developing’ country context to use randomized controlled trial (RCT) research design.
One of the most detailed accounts is as follows: "The design of the impact evaluation of Progresa in communities and households is quasi-experimental...To undertake this component of the evaluation, a random sample of communities with 'high' or 'very high' degrees of marginalization were selected which would be incorporated into the program during Phase II (November 1997) and which would serve as the [treatment] communities...Another sample of communities with similar characteristics was randomly designated from those that could have been the object of later selection, and that could function as controls...the size of the sample was estimated starting from a universe of 4,546 localities to choose 330 base localities, and from a universe of 1,850 to choose 191 control localities, using a distribution proportional to the size of the locality.”[17]Attrition bias is a well-known issue in quantitative study designs which can create a situation "analytically similar"[18] to selection bias in that "attrition lead[s] to selective [read: systematically different] samples.
"[21] The presence of nonrandom attrition indicates that even if the samples were experimentally selected and statistically equivalent to begin with, by the end of the experiment period they would have been significantly unequal.
One of the paramount objectives at the core of Progresa’s development, therefore, was to establish the program's apolitical status by sustaining it through the presidential switch in 2000.
Vicente Fox Quesada, leader of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), won the presidential elections on July 2, 2000 and took office on December 1.
Surviving the presidential election cycle — a feat never before accomplished by a Mexican social program — Progresa endured through the first changeover of the national ruling party in 71 years.
Program supporters used the transition period to convince skeptical parties in the new administration of Progresa' effectiveness through personal contact, meetings, and media reports.