Equity through Innovation: Closing the Gaps Using Phone-based Interventions to Reach Caregivers–Evidence from Bangladesh, Palestine, and Northern Ghana.

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Parents powerfully influence their children’s developmental and educational outcomes and parenting interventions targeting children 0-2 have been shown to increase future earnings and school attainment (Heckman, 2014) and parent engagement through the school years improves academic outcomes (Fan & Chen, 2001; Jeynes, 2005). The role of parents in children’s development became even more crucial during the COVID 19 pandemic as alternative spaces in which a child may develop, such as schools or child care centers, became inaccessible. While parents were becoming increasingly crucial, the COVID-19 pandemic was simultaneously making parenting more difficult–specifically for the most economically disadvantaged families. For school-aged children, school closures meant relying on parents’ involvement in their remote learning, which would be especially difficult for parents lacking education themselves, working outside the home during shutdown, or lacking access to educational resources, serving to further deepen inequalities as children from the most economically disadvantaged families faced increased learning loss (Wolf et al., 2021). For young children (0-2), the risk factors, such as parental stress, food insecurity and economic hardship, that can limit the nurturing and stimulating interactions needed were only exacerbated while lack of access to childcare increased. The accumulation of adversities during this critical period of human development carry consequences that can reverberate throughout an individual’s life and across broader society. This in turn threatens a pernicious cycle of instability and poverty, damaging individual prospects as well as larger community goals of social cohesion, resilience, and equity.

In an effort to reach parents and provide them with support in a time when face-to-face access was difficult, new reliance on remote interventions emerged–bringing new innovations as well as new challenges. This panel explores, compares, and provides evidence from three phone-based interventions targeting caregivers in Rohingya refugee camps led by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), in Palestine’s West Bank with World Vision, and remote regions of Northern Ghana led by the University of Pennsylvania. Rigorous evidence from randomized-control trials, experiences from remote piloting, findings from monitoring, and lessons learned will be shared in order to add to the Global education community’s understanding of what works when it comes to phone-based interventions. The growing mode of phone-based interventions holds promise for reducing inequality by reaching those who may not necessarily have access to interventions, but there are still challenges to overcome. This panel will explore these challenges, such as measuring quality, the viability and quality of remote and blended programming from lock-down phases of the pandemic to the current phase, and recommendations for future caregiver programming.

Sub Unit

• Early Childhood Development SIG

Chair

• Katelin Wilton, International Rescue Committee

Individual Presentations

• Gindegi Goron: reaching Rohingya and host community caregivers through IVR, phone-based and blended modalities - Ahsan Mahmud, International Rescue Committee; Katelin Wilton, International Rescue Committee

• Piloting a text-based intervention in Northern Ghana aimed at improving caregiver engagement - Autumn Brown