Education to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty

Mexico is ranked the 15th richest nation in the world. However, it has a Gini Index of 45.9 percent. This means that 41.9 percent of the total population is poor and lives with US$1.25 per day, according to the UN. This situation causes huge and uneven wealth distribution in families.

The Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), one of the biggest international collaborative institutes addressing the causes of intergenerational poverty, argues that the transmission of intergenerational poverty is the long-term effect of derisory and inaccessible education. However, accessibility to welfare services like education does not ensure quality.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks access to education, from elementary to university, in a scale from 0 to 100, 0 being the greatest accessibility. Mexico is at 76, while the global average is at 72. The US scores 47 and the UK 33. WEF also ranks the quality of elementary education between 0 and 200, being 0 the best quality. In this category, Mexico scores 114 points while the global average is 60 points, which puts Mexico below 100 countries. In this category, countries like the US score 11 points and the UK 27 points.

For countries to be able to break intergenerational poverty, they need to provide high-quality education that can impact positively in the productivity of children and in the long-run make them capable of participating in the labor sector and increase their possible income.

Well-prepared human capital is essential to enable and introduce younger generations into a sustainable and formal labor workforce with higher competitiveness standards and therefore higher wages. This leads to reduced income inequality in the future and consequently lowering intergenerational poverty.

The most important actor in the generation of tangible solutions is the state. As an example, Brazil introduced in 2010 Bolsa Familia, the biggest welfare program in the world according to the World Bank. This program has succeeded in reducing the rate of intergenerational poverty by benefiting 18,000 families. It helps families by conditioning income to mandatory school attendance and scholar performance. In addition, the government introduced public policies that address accessibility and quality of the country’s education system. As a result, by the end of 2019, Brazil had elevated its access-to-education ranking according to WEF to 59 points, almost 20 points up from its 78 score in 2013 and well above Mexico and the world’s average.