According to Jim Giles, writing in the New Scientist (subscription), New York this year became the first city in a rich country to try to alleviate poverty by offering cash incentives to improve people's engagement in areas such as education, health and employment. Mexico was the pioneer. Top-down projects, such as subsidies for staple foods and healthcare were mostly unsuccessful. So the government gave cash payments to low-income families to be spent however they wanted, provdied they behaved in approved ways. FOr example, a family could earn about $20 a month by enrolling a child in primary school and ensuring that s/he attended regularly. Similar payments were made if children had regular health check-ups.
In the rich countries it is mainly the US that uses such incentives, and there only in a few isolated drug-treatment programmes. Whether they succeed in stopping drug abuse in the long term is uncertain.
It's a controversial approach, but one of which I approve.I'd prefer governments not to make the payments directly, but rather to set broad health, education and employment targets, and let the private sector work on achieving them. But accepting that reducing substance abuse (for instance) is an end in itself, I'd encourage the disconcertingly rare approach of setting a target and doing whatever is necessary to achieve it. The chosen methods may seem controversial, counterintuitive or as in this case, a subsidy to the undeserving or the dissolute, but so long as they are ethical and legal I think it would be irresponsible to rule them out.
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