This paper is one in a series of World Bank Working Papers that seeks to document the experience of Brazil's Bolsa Família Program. It highlights the key nuts and bolts of designing and implementing the BFP in Brazil's decentralized context. Like other conditional cash transfers (CCTs), the BFP seeks to help (a) reduce current poverty and inequality, by providing a minimum level of income for extremely poor families; and (b) break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by conditioning these transfers on beneficiary compliance with human capital requirements (school attendance, vaccines, pre-natal visits). The program also seeks to help empower BFP beneficiaries by linking them to other complementary services.