Bolsa Família, 20 years: ‘My parents were beneficiaries, today I am a software engineer’

It wouldn’t be a big deal if Dener and Vitória were children of the Brazilian middle class, but that’s not the case. Or it was not the case in their childhood, in the early 2000s, when the family of Dener and Vitória received the Bolsa Escola and was part of the first generation of beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, an income transfer program that turns 20 in October 2023.

Of that first generation, only 1 in 5 children of beneficiaries of the program continued to receive Bolsa Família 14 years later, according to a survey published in April 2022 by the Institute for Mobility and Social Development (see more details about the study below).