Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs : Experimental Evidence from The Gambia
Early childhood experiences lay the foundation for outcomes later in life. Policy makers in developing countries face a dual challenge of promoting access to and quality of early childhood development services, but evidence on how to manage this tr...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/319421550087245992/Improving-Access-and-Quality-in-Early-Childhood-Development-Programs-Experimental-Evidence-from-The-Gambia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31275 |
| Summary: | Early childhood experiences lay the
foundation for outcomes later in life. Policy makers in
developing countries face a dual challenge of promoting
access to and quality of early childhood development
services, but evidence on how to manage this trade-off is
scarce. This paper studies two experiments of early
childhood development programs in The Gambia: one increasing
access to services, and another improving service quality.
In the first experiment, new community-based early childhood
development centers were introduced to randomly chosen
villages that had no preexisting, structured early childhood
development services. In the second experiment, a randomly
assigned subset of existing early childhood development
centers received intensive provider training. The analysis
finds no evidence that either intervention improved average
levels of child development. Exploratory analysis suggests
that the first experiment, which increased access to
relatively low-quality early childhood development services,
led to declines in child development among children from
less disadvantaged households. The evidence supports that
these households may have been steered away from better
quality early childhood settings in their homes. Comparisons
of observationally similar children across experiments
reveal that existing early childhood development centers
increased language skills by 0.4 standard deviation relative
to the community-based alternative, reflecting differences
in program quality. |
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