This paper experimentally examines the impacts of a large-scale government program that increased the supply and quality of community preschools in rural Cambodia.
... See More + The construction of new preschool facilities was paired with two demand-side interventions designed to stimulate additional enrollment into preschools. The newly constructed preschools caused an increase in enrollment rates but the demand-side interventions did not. One year after the program started, the paper finds small and significant impacts on cognitive (0.04 standard deviations) and socio-emotional development (0.09 standard deviations). The analysis shows that the cognitive impacts are driven by children from the wealthiest quartile, while the program had limited impacts on children from the poorest families. The effects on cognitive development increased after two years for the wealthiest (the cognitive gap widened) while the effects on socio-emotional development faded out across the board. Using detailed classroom surveys and in-class observations, the paper shows that the program had large impacts on the quality of preschool infrastructure and materials but only limited impacts the quality of educational processes -- the results therefore suggest that further improvement of those processes might be needed to foster the development of disadvantaged children.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9070 DEC 02, 2019
The main purpose of this evaluation was to study the impact of a supply-side intervention aimed at improving the quality of community preschools, combined with a demand-side intervention aimed at stimulating demand for preschools of Cambodia.
... See More + The evaluation had three treatment arms as follows: (i) the construction of formal community preschools (CPS) and associated activities (T1); (ii) the addition of a home visit by a village chief and a door-to-door campaign to promote awareness about the CPS and the value of education (T2); and (iii) the further addition of a home-based program consisting of trained core mothers providing more intensive training sessions to caregivers in the village that focused on good parenting, the value of nutrition, and the importance of preschool (T3). The principal finding of the evaluation is that the construction of CPS increased participation in preschool. The findings also highlight that, notwithstanding the robust evidence that high quality preschool experiences boost child development, engendering those experiences in a program at scale in a low-income capacity-constrained environment is difficult.
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Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development.
... See More + Yet, less work has documented the joint influences of parenting and nutrition status on child development among children in the preschool years living in low-income countries. Using panel data on parenting, nutrition status, and early developmental outcomes of about 7,000 Cambodian preschool-age children, this paper demonstrates that inequities in early development associated with family wealth are evident at the start of preschool and increase over time. A significant share of these inequalities can be explained by differences in parental stimulation and early nutrition status. Better educated parents engage in better parental activities that stimulate children's development. However, the positive association between parental activities and child outcomes is particularly strong for non-stunted children, and parental activities can only explain about 8-14 percent of the cognitive gap between the lowest and highest wealth quintiles. The results highlight the need for integrated interventions that address both parenting and early nutrition, also suggesting that parenting interventions for the most disadvantaged families should be carefully designed and evaluated to ensure maximum effectiveness.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8529 JUL 12, 2018
