CCT beneficiary Fikriye Lermi with her children

June 2007. TRABZON, Turkey—For Fikriye Lermi, a 23 year-old unemployed and illiterate single mother of three, the day starts early in her disheveled, poorly furnished 2-room basement apartment overlooking the cobblestoned street of one of Trabzon’s poorest neighborhoods.

Located in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region, that has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, Trabzon is home to some 300,000 inhabitants, including many impoverished families, such as Fikriye’s, who are not able to make ends meet without assistance from the local social services office.

The daily morning ritual of running errands keeps Fikriye’s mind off more serious problems, such as her lack of a job, money and clothes. She makes a simple breakfast for her three young children, who at 3, 6 and 7 years of age require all their mother’s attention. Each morning, Fikriye wakes them up, gets them dressed, and sends her 7-year old son to school with the bare minimum of school supplies: a couple of books and pencils in his backpack, and off he is to school for the mid-morning classes.

But things are not as straightforward as they appear. For many poor Turkish families, it is almost impossible to send their children to school when the money is tight and unemployed parents struggle for survival, taking the odd temporary jobs in order to put food on the table for the family. Under these circumstances, child education is for many families more luxury than priority.

The financial aid which enables Fikriye to send her 7-year old son Mert to the nearby school comes from the US$380 million Conditional Cash Transfers program, administered by the local Social Solidarity Fund General Directorate’s office and financed under Turkey's Social Risk Mitigation Project, which the World Bank helped finance.  Although the monthly amount she receives is meager, a rough equivalent of $40, it covers most school expenses, such as books, pencils and notepads. In exchange for the money, Fikriye has to ensure that her child maintains a flawless school attendance record and undergoes regular medical checkups.

For Fikriye, being able to send her son to school is a matter of personal pride and determination. “I was never able to go to school myself, and never learned how to read and write but I do want my children to get an education so that they are not left behind in society as I was,” she says.

First introduced after the economic crisis in 2001, Turkey's Conditional Cash Transfers program was initially piloted in 6 of Turkey's 850 districts, and was soon rolled out at the national level. It targetted the poorest 6% of children aged 0 to 18 years, with families identified through a proxy-means test. While it was estimated at the onset of the program that there would be 1.3 million beneficiaries, the initiative was eventually extended to cover 2.6 million people, with 900,000 families receiving benefits.

Turkey's Conditional Cash Transfers program has succeeded in providing highly targeted social assistance transfers to the poorest families with children. The program is also recognized for its extraordinary imprint, which generated positive social transformations in such areas as women empowerment, girls education, health benefits, and family planning.

The Conditional Cash Transfers program has had an extraordinary impact on women, who are the primary recipients of the financial assistance. All mothers enrolled in the CCT program now have their own bank accounts, many of them for the first time in their lives. Prior to the implementation of the program, the majority of them had no access to the banking system.

The Conditional Cash Transfers program requires registration of their mothers’ marriage registration certificates. This policy encourages women to seek formal legal registration of their marriage, which confers rights to women under Turkish law, and in doing so ensures their legal protection.

The legal requirement to register one's children, which was also made a condition to enroll in the Conditional Cast Transfers program, has also had a profound positive impact on girls' access to education in Turkey. The increased enrollment of girls is accompanied by the overall increase in attendance rates and, more significantly, by child immunization rates. Immunization increased by 14 percentage points among the CCT children, compared to similar children who were not in the program.

The World Bank-supported Social Risk Mitigation project in Turkey was completed in 2006. The Conditional Cash Transfers program is continuing with government financing.