Experimental Evidence from an Integrated Early Childhood Parenting Program in Sierra Leone

Anjali Chandra (), Subha Mani, Heather Dolphin (), Meredith Dyson () and Yembeh Marah ()
Additional contact information
Anjali Chandra: Fordham University
Heather Dolphin: Catholic Relief Services
Meredith Dyson: UNICEF
Yembeh Marah: Catholic Relief Services

No 14054, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We present findings from an integrated early childhood parenting program on stunting and wasting in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Importantly, where half the communities were randomly assigned to receive the parenting program and the remaining half served as a control that received standard nutritional counseling delivered through community meetings and home visits, keeping all social aspects of the intervention identical between the treatment and the control. We find that access to the intervention reduced the incidence of wasting by 3 percentage points and had no impact on stunting. We find improvements in parenting practices related to psychosocial stimulation and harsh discipline to be the primary mechanisms through which wasting declines. We find no differences in responsive parenting practices between the treatment and the control. These results suggest that integrated early childhood parenting programs when delivered alongside standard nutritional counseling via existing mother support groups have the potential to improve long-term well-being through reductions in wasting as well as improvements in parenting practices related to stimulation and harsh discipline.

Keywords: early childhood development; nutrition; stimulation; randomized control trial; parenting intervention; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I25 J13 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14054.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp14054

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().