A/HRC/22/50 Familia) (A/HRC/13/33/Add.6 and A/HRC/19/59/Add.2). An early example is Bangladesh‟s Female Secondary School Assistance Project (FSSAP) launched in 1993 (see para. 16 above), which was complemented, in July 2002, by the Primary Education Stipend Project (PESP). The PESP aimed to increase the educational participation (enrolment, continued attendance and educational performance) of primary school children from poor families throughout Bangladesh (initially estimated at more than 5 million pupils) by providing cash payments to targeted households. Despite significant targeting problems during its initial phase, the programme is credited for improving educational attainments. 25. Insofar as conditionalities can improve the educational attainments of girls, they should be welcomed. CCT benefits are usually given to women, as the “caregivers” of households – in Brazil, 94 per cent of the recipients of the Bolsa Familia transfers are women.32 This is expected to strengthen their negotiating role within the family, although such an outcome is far from automatic.33 The Right to Food Guidelines recommend that States "give priority to channelling food assistance via women as a means of enhancing their decision-making role and ensuring that the food is used to meet the household‟s food requirements." (guideline 13.4). Beyond these aspects however, too little attention has been paid to the gender impacts of CCTs, when such programmes are put in place. Three concerns have emerged: (a) The approach adopted by CCT programmes may reinforce gender stereotyped roles as women are prioritized as "mothers" and “caregivers”, rather than empowered as equal to men. Women are relied upon to ensure that the household invests in children, leading some authors to claim that child-centered policies such as those illustrated by CCT programmes tend to sideline "the equality claims of adult women and attention to their needs [...] in favor of those of children, including girls."34 (b) Conditionalities are sometimes designed in ways that do not sufficiently take into account the time constraints that women face, in that it is usually the women who are expected to ensure that the conditionalities are met, especially as regards regular visits to health-care centres. (c) Where compliance with the conditionalities requires women to leave the household, it may present an opportunity for them to obtain information about their rights and about practices that can improve nutritional outcomes within their household, and enable them to broaden their social network. But the cultural norms that reduce the mobility of women and their time poverty could make their participation in such programmes impossible. B. Public works programmes 26. Public works programmes are designed to provide employment to families who have no other source of income; remuneration is usually in the form of cash (cash-for-work) or food (food-for-work), or a combination of both. Because the work is demanding and the 32 33 34 R. Holmes and N. Jones, “Rethinking social protection using a gender lens.” Working Paper 320. (London, Overseas Development Institute, 2010), p. 15. Assessments of CCTs where the transfers were provided to women have shown very limited impact on power relations within the family (M. Molyneux, "Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico's Conditional Transfer Programme", Social Politics and Administration, vol. 40, No. 4 (2006), pp. 429-40). This result is consistent with studies that document the widespread character of the appropriation of women's wages by men. J. Jenson, "Lost in Translation: The Social Investment Perspective and Gender Equality", Social Politics, vol. 16, No. 4 (2009), pp. 446-483. 11

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