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News > Mexico

Mexico Report: 85.71% Of Peña Nieto's Social Programs 'Failed'

  • Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales and Mexico's president Enrique Peña Nieto participate in a forum during the XXVI Ibero-American Summit in Antigua Guatemala

    Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales and Mexico's president Enrique Peña Nieto participate in a forum during the XXVI Ibero-American Summit in Antigua Guatemala | Photo: Reuters

Published 20 November 2018
Opinion

According to Alfredo Elizondo, coordinator of Gesoc, President Enrique Peña Nieto's presidency "was a lost six-year period in terms of social development."

A new report released Tuesday, reveals that in 2017, 85 percent of social programs were listed as performing badly, or the data was opaque, according to the Agency for Development (Gesoc). The Performance Index of Federal Public Programs (INDEP) is a tool used to measure the performance of federal projects, programs and actions related to social development.

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Mexico's Peña Nieto Broke Half His Campaign Promises

According to Alfredo Elizondo, coordinator of Gesoc,  President Enrique Peña Nieto's presidency "was a lost six-year period in terms of social development."

In general, on a 0 to 100 scale (0 indicating terrible performance and 100 being the highest quality), the average rating for the programs implemented by Peña Nieto's government is 61.88. Most of them barely qualified with 45 out of the 132 ranked programs having "failed" the test and with only 3 programs having a score higher than 90.

The latter were; the "National System of Researchers" (92.7), "Graduate Scholarships and Quality Support" (92.3) and "Production and Distribution of Books of Educational Materials " (93.7).

According to Gesoc, the government approved a budget increase for 2018 on programs with a high-performance rating, but it also increased by almost the same percentage for programs with a high level of opacity and a low-performance rate.

The "limited use of evidence for the programming and budgeting of social development policy has translated into an inefficient reduction of poverty levels," accused Elizondo. 

Gesoc is asking the Congress to increase the amount of money in next year's budget for social programs. But it is also asking to strengthen budget efficiency and improve transparency and accountability. This is based on the fact that "the Mexican State has the obligation to address the gaps that are included in the multidimensional measurement of poverty."

From all the programs investigated, Gesoc considers programs like Youth Building the Future, Pension for Older Adults and Pension for People with Disability to be indispensable for the incoming government. These programs will give better and wider protection for the target populations, which is why the agency is calling for a higher budget to be approved by President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

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