Abstract
Colombia’s national early childhood strategy launched in 2011 aimed at improving the quality of childcare services offered to socio-economically vulnerable children, and included the possibility that children and their childcare providers could transfer from non-parental family daycare units to large childcare centers in urban areas. This study seeks to understand whether the offer to transfer and the actual transfer from one program to the other had an impact on child cognitive and socioemotional development, and nutrition, using a cluster-randomized control trial with a sample of 2767 children between the ages of 6 and 60 months located in 14 cities in Colombia. The results indicate a negative effect of this initiative on cognitive development, a positive effect on nutrition, and no statistically significant effect of the intervention on socioemotional development. We also explored the extent to which these impacts might be explained by differences in the quality of both services during the transition, and report that quality indicators are low in both programs but are significantly worse in centers compared to community nurseries.
Highlights
An overwhelming 250 million children younger than 5 years of age in developing countries have been identified as being at risk of not reaching their full developmental potential because they live in poverty and face the psychosocial and material challenges associated with economic adversity (Black et al, 2017)
The results indicate that the offer to transfer from HCB to CDI had a negative and statistically significant effect on cognitive development by Ages & Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) of 0.11 standard deviations (SD) at 95% con
To evaluate the impacts of the offer to transfer from small community nurseries to large centers on childcare quality and child development and nutrition, we randomly assigned HCBs to receive an offer to transfer to CDIs in 14 cities in Colombia
Summary
An overwhelming 250 million children younger than 5 years of age in developing countries have been identified as being at risk of not reaching their full developmental potential because they live in poverty and face the psychosocial and material challenges associated with economic adversity (Black et al, 2017). These children have higher probabilities of underperforming at school and, of reaching adulthood with lower earnings capacity, higher probability of risky behaviors and lower overall quality of life (Britto et al, 2017). The average cost of the program is 440 US dollars (USD) per child per year
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