Fostering early childhood development in low-resource communities: Evidence from a group-based parenting intervention in Tanzania

Margaret Leighton, Anitha Martine and Julius Massaga

World Development, 2023, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: Group-based parent training programmes present an affordable means to influence the early experiences of children at scale. This paper reports evidence on the effectiveness of a practice-led intervention piloted in rural Tanzania evaluated through a matched control study design. The core of the programme is an 8–10 week caregiver training course led by local facilitators, built around early stimulation and nurturing care. After two years of implementation, the intervention led to improvements in the development of 3-year olds of 0.29 standard deviations. Detailed data on caregivers indicates that these improvements are due to changes in the type and frequency of caregiver-child interactions for both mothers and fathers, as well as the quality of play materials in the home.

Keywords: Early child development; Child care policy; Parenting; Impact evaluation; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I25 I28 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X23001535
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:170:y:2023:i:c:s0305750x23001535

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106335

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().