Value defining Brazil’s extreme poverty line is adjusted as from 1st June. Increased benefits to be paid in June.
Brasilia, May 2, 2014. From June 1, the value that defines the extreme poverty baseline will be increased by 10% – from R$70 to R$77. This means that the Bolsa Familia Program will provide extra income for families so that no family has a monthly per capita monthly income of below R$77. Overall, this increase means that 36 million people will continue to escape extreme poverty.
Brazil´s extreme poverty line was established at the time of the launch of the Brazil Without Poverty Plan in June 2011. This was the same criteria used by the United Nations for the Millennium Development Goals: US$1.25 a day per person. The value has now been adjusted according to the purchasing power parity indicator used by the UN.
According to President Dilma Rousseff´s decree published in today’s edition of the Official Gazette, other Bolsa Familia benefits have been adjusted upwards. The variable benefit paid to pregnant women, nursing mothers, children and adolescents up to age 15 increases from R$32 to R$35, up to a limit of R$175 per month per family. Meanwhile, the variable benefit for adolescents up to age 17 increases from R$38 to R$42 a month, with an upper limit of R$84 per family.
The measure will cost R$1.7 billion in 2014, equal to seven months´ worth of benefits. The estimated investment in the Program for 2015 is R$2.7 billion.
The additional amount payable will ensure that every family member will receive over R$77, when each person´s earned income is added to the benefit from the Bolsa Familia. The average payment for families who receive the benefits, designed to enable them to escape from extreme poverty, will increase from R$216 to R$242 monthly. The amount to be paid per family will continue to vary from case to case according to the severity of poverty among poorer households.
For the totality of 14 million families receiving the Bolsa Familia the average payment will increase from the present R$150 to R$167 a month. Since the beginning of President Dilma Rousseff´s mandate the average amount of benefit has increased by 44%.
Since 2012, additional Bolsa Familia benefits were targeted at households which continued to have family incomes equal to or less than R$70, despite them already being in receipt of the primary Bolsa payments. Initially, the income supplements were paid to families with children aged up to 6, but subsequently this was extended to those with children and adolescents of up to 15 years of age. In March 2013 all the beneficiary families, regardless of whether or not they had children or adolescents, began to receive a supplementary benefit of up to R$70 per head.