FGTS for Childcare Offers Limited Relief Amid Bolsonaro's Education Cuts

In May 2022, the Bolsonaro administration announced a policy allowing workers to withdraw money from their FGTS—a mandatory savings fund for formal employees—to pay for private daycare. The move came as the government was simultaneously gutting public childcare investment. The Proinfância program, the federal government's primary tool for building public daycare centers, had its budget slashed by 85 percent. Spending fell from R$472 million in 2018 to R$68 million in 2021, adjusted for inflation. The timing revealed a fundamental contradiction in the administration's stated priorities.

The policy was framed as a solution to women's employment crisis. In the last quarter of 2021, women's unemployment stood at 13.9 percent compared to 9 percent for men. Many women cannot seek work because they have no one to care for their children. Without access to affordable daycare, they are locked out of the labor market or forced to leave jobs. The government presented FGTS withdrawal as a way to unlock women's economic participation by letting them pay for private childcare themselves.

But the policy's reach is severely limited by a simple fact: most children without daycare access come from families without formal employment. Analysis by Todos Pela Educação, a nonprofit education advocacy group, found that only 25 percent of children under three who are not in school live with a formally employed parent eligible to access FGTS. Another 5 percent have military or civil service parents who are employed but ineligible for the fund. Of the 6.6 million children under three outside of school entirely, 27 percent live in households where the primary adult is not working and not seeking work. For these families, the FGTS withdrawal offers nothing.

The policy also represents a shift in how the government approaches childcare: away from public provision and toward private markets. Rather than building public daycare centers, the administration is essentially telling workers to use their own savings to purchase private services. This mirrors an earlier initiative called Auxílio Criança Cidadã, which provides R$200 to R$300 monthly to families with children under four who lack access to public or subsidized private daycare. Experts view both approaches with skepticism. The poorest regions of Brazil lack sufficient private daycare supply. Even where private options exist, the money available is often insufficient to guarantee quality care. The result is likely to deepen inequality rather than solve it.

Bruno Dalcolmo, the executive secretary of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, acknowledged the policy's limitations during the announcement. He stated plainly that the measure would not meet the full demand for daycare. He framed it as one option among several needed to improve women's employment prospects. Priscila Cruz, president of Todos Pela Educação, was more direct in her criticism. She noted that FGTS withdrawal is not a public subsidy at all—it is simply workers accessing their own money. There is no public benefit, no policy lever, no expansion of the childcare system. A woman is merely taking her own savings to pay for private care.

Economist Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getulio Vargas acknowledged that the diagnosis is correct: access to daycare does improve and preserve women's employment. But the solution is flawed. Voucher-based systems sound good in theory, he said, but they assume that simply giving families money will create supply. In reality, building new daycare centers takes time. The private sector cannot instantly expand capacity in poor regions where demand is highest but profit margins are lowest. Without accompanying public investment in infrastructure, the policy is unlikely to move the needle.

The broader context makes the contradiction stark. Public daycare enrollment fell for the first time in two decades under Bolsonaro. Between 2019 and 2021, public system enrollment dropped 2.3 percent. Meanwhile, Brazil still needs to enroll 2.2 million additional children under three to meet the National Education Plan's goal of reaching at least 50 percent enrollment in that age group. Currently, only 37 percent of children under three attend daycare nationally. Among the wealthiest 25 percent of families, enrollment reaches 54.3 percent. Among the poorest, it is 28 percent. The gap is not accidental. It reflects decades of underinvestment in public childcare, now accelerating under a government that has chosen to redirect resources elsewhere—including, as reporting revealed, spending more on robotics kits for a company connected to the Chamber of Deputies president than on daycare in a single quarter.

Cruz argued that the Bolsonaro administration has invested its political capital in education issues that appeal to its base: homeschooling, military-run schools, and culture war battles over gender and identity. Genuine expansion of public education has not been the priority. The FGTS policy, then, is not a solution to childcare access. It is a way to appear responsive to women's employment concerns while continuing to defund the public systems that serve the poorest families. For the women who need daycare most—those without formal employment, those in regions without private options, those without savings to withdraw—the policy offers nothing at all.