ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how women have been incorporated into development policy in Latin America in recent decades with particular reference to Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, which have increasingly been targeted to, and through, female beneficiaries. In particular, it argues that anti-poverty efforts targeting women have been more efficiency than equality-driven, and in many cases have done relatively little to address gendered rights and responsibilities within households and communities. Since investing in women is seen to be one of the most efficient routes to ensuring wider development aims, there has been a generalised bid to alleviate poverty primarily, or even exclusively, through women, effectively producing a feminisation of poverty alleviation. In Mexico, the priority of CCTs in their various incarnations has been to build human capital, while the main objective in Brazil has been to transfer resources to poor households.
