Home Visiting at Scale and Child Development

• In Event: Implementing Early and Middle Childhood Interventions for Population Impact Around the Globe

Abstract

Most evidence on the effects of policies to promote child development refers to pilot programs implemented under tightly-controlled circumstances. We provide novel evidence on the effects of home visiting delivered at scale. The program we study, Cuna Mas in Peru, was started from scratch in 2012 and, within 3 years, was delivering weekly home visits to 93,000 children in rural areas country-wide. Identification comes from the random assignment of municipalities to treatment and control conditions. We show that, after approximately 2 years, children randomly assigned to treatment have child development scores that are 0.10 standard deviations higher than those assigned to control.
We also find positive changes in parenting practices and a higher probability to enrol in preschool. The talk will also address lessons learnt from this experience and how it has informed the design and implementation of other large-scale parenting programs in Latin America.

Bio: Marta Rubio-Codina is a Senior Specialist in Child Development at the Social Protection and Health Division at the IDB. Prior to joining the Bank, she was a senior researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toulouse. She has significant experience in the design and evaluation of at-scale home visiting interventions in Colombia, India, Peru, and Ecuador; and is currently working on strategies to improve process quality in childcare settings. Marta led a longitudinal study to identify cost-effective and scalable instruments to measure developmental outcomes in very young children; has advised the design of ECD modules in national health and nutrition surveys in Mexico and Ecuador; and is involved in a new effort, led by the WHO, to develop a global ECD indicator for children under 3 years. She has published research in several peer-reviewed economics and medical journals.

Authors

• M. Caridad Araujo, Inter-American Development Bank
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marta Dormal, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sally Grantham-McGregor, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Fabiola Lazarte, Instituto de Investigación Nutricional, Perú
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marta Rubio-Codina, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
  Presenting Author

• Norbert Schady, Inter-American Development Bank
  Non-Presenting Author