Social protection interventions have burgeoned across Latin America since the late 1990s, emerging in part from a widespread dissatisfaction with the inefficiency and clientelism that plagued the older generation of social protection programmes in the region. Targeted conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have been a popular social protection response to address inequality and break the intergenerational transmission of extreme poverty. The experience of CCTs has been well documented and analysed over the last two decades, but the extent to which they address the gendered dimensions of poverty and vulnerability remains an area of debate. 

This Background Note examines the extent to which gendered economic, social risks are addressed in conditional cash transfers in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru.