Cutural adaptation of a family strengthening intervention to improve early childhood development and reduce violence among families in Colombia

• In Event: The education sector in response, resilience and recovery during and after violent conflicts

Proposal

Colombia has made important progress towards improving early childhood education over the past 20 years by expanding reach and services to children under the age of 5 years. Despite these improvements, there is still an educational gap among young children in Colombia, which is more evident among low-income, racial/ethnic minorities, and children living in rural areas. Besides access to early childhood education, children in Colombia face another widespread issue; the use of physical punishment as an educational tool. Recent studies have found that up to 53% of women in Colombia view physical punishment as a necessary method to educate their children. In an effort to promote early childhood development and prevent physical punishment and violence, an evidence-based, family strengthening intervention was culturally adapted to the Colombian context.

An evidence-based intervention originally developed and tested in Rwanda was selected given the extensive evidence that exists demonstrating important improvements in childhood development, parental mental health, and household violence reduction.

Using the ADAPT-ITT 8-phase framework, Sugira Muryango was carefully adapted to the Colombian context. The ADAPT-ITT framework is a well-validated process that helps guide surface and deep-level adaptations of interventions to ensure that the adapted intervention is relevant and acceptable to the population that it will be delivered to. The ADAPT-ITT framework has 8 phases, each corresponding to a letter in the acronym. Phase 1: Needs Assessment. The purpose of this phase is to conduct a needs assessment with the community to ensure their priorities are addressed. Phase 2: Decision. In phase 2, the purpose is to decide how to incorporate the data collected from phase 1 into the existing intervention. Phase 3: Administration. This phase consists of administering “theatre tests” or trial sessions with target participants and obtain qualitative feedback. Phase 4: Production. This phase consists of producing the first draft of the manual including the feedback obtained from participants in phase 3. Phase 5: Topical experts. In this phase, two topical experts are engaged to provide a thorough content review. Phase 6: Integration. In this phase, feedback obtained from topical experts is integrated into the second draft of the culturally adapted intervention. Phase 7: Training. In this phase, facilitators and supervisors who are in charge of leading the sessions were trained on the newly adapted manual. Phase 8: Testing. The final phase consisted of conducting a small pilot with 15 families using the newly adapted manual to determine its appropriateness, acceptability and feasibility.

Conducting a thorough, in-depth cultural adaptation of an intervention that has demonstrated effectiveness in another context can help accelerate uptake and save resources in the long run. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using a validated framework to conduct a cultural adaptation of an evidence-based intervention to improve childhood development, parental mental health, and reduce household violence.

Author

• Wendy Wheaton, USAID