But what happens next? Sustained impacts of a group-based parenting intervention to promote early childhood development in rural Kenya
9 November, 2022 12:00 hrs
Title: But what happens next? Sustained impacts of a group-based parenting intervention to promote early childhood development in rural Kenya
Abstract: Approximately 250 million children (43%) under age 5 from low and middle-income countries (LMICs), will not reach their full developmental potential due to the effects of living in poverty. Parenting matters, and poverty negatively affects parenting behaviors through both financial and psychological constraints. A growing body of evidence shows that responsive parenting interventions can improve ECD, at least in the short term, and the vast majority of these interventions are delivered via home visits. However, home visits are prohibitively expensive to implement at scale, and the very few programs that have included longer-term follow-ups show that early impacts tend to fade out over time. Group-based delivery models have been proposed as a more cost-effective alternative to deliver these programs, but evidence on their effectiveness and sustainability is limited.
In this paper, we present the impacts after two years of Msingi Bora (Swahili for “Strong Foundation”), an 8-month group parenting intervention tested in a cluster Randomized Control Trial in rural Kenya that improved children’s cognitive and socioemotional development and parenting behaviors in the short-term. After the end of the original 8-month program, in half of the original intervention villages we introduced a light-touch “booster” intervention spanning additional two years to test the value-added of offering continued program support to help sustain impacts longer-term. In a two-year assessment, we find that the original intensive 8-month program achieved sustained impacts on children’s cognition and maternal stimulation behaviors two years later, though these medium-term impacts represent declines of 29%-65% from two years prior. Boosters did not add any value to sustain these early impacts, but they were protective factor against fade-out in children’s socioemotional outcomes, and they also improved positive disciplinary practices. In an exploratory mediation analysis, we find that sustained improvements in parenting behaviors strongly mediated sustained improvements in ECD outcomes, as well as evidence of dynamic complementarities. Finally, combining different analyses, we find suggestive evidence that our program benefited more disadvantaged families and children in the longer-term, and thus helped remediate early deficits across SES groups.
Speaker: Italo López (University Southern California)
Location:
Sala de Consejo, Beauchef 851, piso 4 | Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, UCHILE
Speaker:
Italo López
MIPP Chile 2024