EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia

Moussa Blimpo (), Pedro Carneiro, Pamela Jervis and Todd Pugatch

No 8737, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2019-02-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/319421550087245992/pdf/WPS8737.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from the Gambia (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from the Gambia (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia (2019) Downloads
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:wbk:wbrwps:8737

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8737