The impact of a community development and poverty reduction program on early childhood development in Morocco

Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali, Caroline Gould Krafft, Touhami Abdelkhalek, Mohamed Benkassmi, Monica I. Chavez, Lucy Katherine Bassett, Fouzia Ejjanoui, Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali, Caroline Gould Krafft, Touhami Abdelkhalek, Mohamed Benkassmi, Monica I. Chavez, Lucy Katherine Bassett and Fouzia Ejjanoui
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Caroline Krafft and Touhami ABDELKHALEK

No 7671, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Participatory community development programs are designed to match government investments with local needs. In Morocco, where issues of inequality and poverty are high on the national agenda, a community development program, the National Initiative for Human Development, targeted high-poverty areas for additional investments. This paper examines whether, in addition to reducing poverty, such programs can also promote human development, specifically early childhood development. Early childhood development forms a critical foundation for later human development and plays a key role in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. Using panel data on communities just above and below the cutoff for National Initiative for Human Development inclusion in rural areas, regression discontinuity and fixed effect models are applied to identify the impact of the program on economic outcomes and early childhood development. Although the analysis finds some transitory impacts of the program on economic outcomes, it finds no impacts on early childhood development. Reducing inequality and promoting human development through early childhood development is likely to require specific, targeted, and sustained initiatives.

Keywords: Inequality; Health Care Services Industry; Early Child and Children'; Early Child and Children's Health; Early Childhood Development; Reproductive Health; Nutrition; Educational Sciences; Hydrology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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