Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate of Brazil’s Liberal Party (PL), has sparked controversy with a proposal to introduce a two-year transition period for recipients of Bolsa Família, the country’s flagship cash-transfer program for low-income households. Bolsonaro was forced to deny that he intended to restrict benefits, but the dispute left questions about the scope of the proposed changes. Before debating an exit strategy, it is worth examining what Brazil has achieved in more than two decades of fighting poverty.
The recent progress has been substantial. According to a study by FGV IBRE, the economic research institute of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, the number of Brazilians living below the poverty line used in the study fell from 71 million in 2022 to 53.4 million in 2025 — a decline of 17.6 million people. Poverty decreased in every Brazilian state, alongside rising inflation-adjusted incomes. Those gains cannot be attributed to Bolsa Família alone: they also reflect a recovery in employment and wages. Yet government transfers played a crucial role. According to Brazil’s statistics agency, IBGE, 23.1% of the population lived in poverty in 2024. Without social transfers, that figure would have reached 28.7%. The impact on extreme poverty was even more pronounced: the rate would have been 10%, rather than 3.5%. Welfare payments did not replace economic activity. They provided a safety net for those still unable to earn enough to meet their basic needs.
The argument that Bolsa Família encourages dependency also needs to be weighed against the size of the payments. Following an increase in October, the program covers 19.3 million households, with an average monthly benefit of R$782.92. For a family of four, that works out to less than R$200 per person. It is a meaningful contribution toward food and other essentials, but hardly a comfortable alternative to employment. That does not mean cash transfers have no influence on economic decisions. The risk of losing benefits may discourage recipients from accepting insecure or poorly paid jobs. The challenge is to ensure that entering the workforce does not mean an immediate loss of financial security. An effective welfare system must protect those who still need assistance without penalizing those beginning to improve their circumstances.
Perhaps the most revealing evidence, however, comes from the next generation. In an interview on Monday with Roda Viva, a current-affairs program on Brazil’s TV Cultura, economist Ricardo Henriques, who helped design Bolsa Família in 2003, highlighted research by the Institute for Mobility and Social Development (IMDS) examining the children of the program’s earliest recipients. Of the 11.6 million children and adolescents receiving benefits in 2005, 64.1% were no longer registered in Cadastro Único, Brazil’s national database of low-income households, by 2019. Nearly 45% had held formal-sector jobs at some point between 2015 and 2019. A subsequent study tracking another generation from 2012 to 2024 found that 48.9% were outside the registry by the end of that period. These figures do not establish that all had achieved lasting economic independence, nor do they isolate the program’s impact on their trajectories. They do suggest, however, that reliance on welfare need not be passed down indefinitely from one generation to the next.
That is the context in which Bolsonaro’s proposal should be assessed. A 24-month protection period is not new: it previously existed under Bolsa Família’s transition rules, which were subsequently modified by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration. Extending that protection could offer additional security to recipients entering the labor market, but it would not resolve the underlying problem. Between March 2023 and September 2026, 5.9 million households left Bolsa Família because their incomes had risen, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development. That is a significant achievement, although leaving the program does not guarantee lasting financial stability. Henriques himself advocates moving toward a broader social policy focused on economic mobility while preserving the existing safety net. Such progress, however, depends on forces beyond the program’s reach: education, productivity, investment and better-paying jobs. It is unreasonable to expect a cash-transfer scheme to deliver outcomes that depend on the performance of the entire economy.
Bolsa Família was never designed to lift poor households into the middle class on its own. Its purpose is to alleviate immediate deprivation while supporting better opportunities for future generations through requirements and incentives linked to health and education. The evidence points to meaningful progress over the past two decades, even as it exposes the limitations of an economy still characterized by low wages and persistent inequality. Improving the transition rules is necessary, but overcoming poverty requires far more than setting an administrative deadline. A government can decide when a family stops receiving Bolsa Família. It cannot decree when that family stops being poor.
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