In October 2016, Brazil launched one of the largest home visiting1 programs in the world—Criança Feliz (or Happy Child). The flagship program aimed to reach the country’s most vulnerable pregnant women and young children.
Even under ordinary circumstances, the task of scaling up a national home visiting program in the biggest, most populous country in South America, with extraordinary geographic and ethnic diversity, would have been daunting. But to complicate matters, Criança Feliz’s arrival coincided with one of the most tumultuous periods in Brazilian politics.
Brazil Is Not for Beginners
Just a few months earlier, Michel Temer had been appointed President of Brazil after his predecessor, Dilma Rouseff, was impeached. The impeachment, although not directly related to the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil’s history, was precipitated by it.
Rouseff, the country’s first female President, was leader of the leftist Worker’s Party (PT), which had been in power for the preceding 13 years, a period during which millions of Brazilians rose out of poverty.2 By 2016, however, a large-scale economic crisis combined with a string of high-profile graft accusations, brought an ignominious end to the PT era.
Temer was Rouseff’s Vice President and leader of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (MDB), linchpin of the PT ruling coalition for more than a decade. When he became President in August 2016, Temer, like many politicians in Brazil’s Congress, was mired in corruption charges and faced historically low approval ratings.3
A Brief History of Brazil’s Politics
Notes
1.A service where trained professionals visit homes of expectant and new mothers and provide support and guidance on aspects of child rearing.
2.World Bank Data, available at: https://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty?locations=BR, accessed January 6, 2019.
3.″Brazil's president Temer's popularity falls on scandals, recession,″ Reuters, December 16, 2016.