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10 Postcards of a Long Journey in Building the Regional Agenda for Early Childhood Development (Part II)

May 8, 2023 por Marta Rubio-Codina - Patricia Jara Males - Carolina Freire Leave a Comment


In the first part of this overview of the Bank supported operations for the design, implementation and evaluation of early childhood services, we explored 5 standout experiences from the numerous efforts that our team have made to improve early childhood development in Latin America and the Caribbean. We now complete this collection with 5 more outstanding cases.

Building Better Skills for Quality Care in Ecuador

A challenge for all countries in the region is to expand the coverage of early childhood development services while incorporating quality standards. A Bank-funded project in Ecuador addresses this challenge by focusing on simultaneous improvements in services’ structural and process quality. This approach ensures that while structural standards are enhanced to create better physical workspaces for children, attention is also given to the quality of interactions, which are crucial for achieving impacts in child development. This ongoing operation has concentrated on acquiring pedagogical and play materials for Centros de Desarrollo Infantil (CDIs) and the family support service Creciendo con Nuestros Hijos (CNH), as well as strengthening their methodologies and content. It also aims to improve service management by introducing user prioritization mechanisms, monitoring external providers, digitizing key management processes in the field and equipping care units with technology.

Generating Evidence on Scaling Up an Effective Intervention in Jamaica

Evidence generated from evaluations of small-scale tested interventions is crucial for planning the transformation of these experiences into broader reaching polices. This is the case with Jamaica’s Reach Up home-visiting program, which includes an important parental intervention component. The challenge here lies in taking this effective family intervention model and implementing it on a national scale. With the Bank’s support, researchers are gathering valuable evidence to understand the program’s key success factors and identify areas for improvement as coverage expands. While an impact evaluation is ongoing to further develop this knowledge, there is already a useful manual available that offers content to promote interactions for children aged 0 to 36 months, with activities that require few materials, are simple to carry out and use easily accessible items.

Ensuring the Quality of Remote Educational Interventions in Colombia

Efforts to improve the delivery of quality early childhood services must focus on how care strategies are implemented in rural and remote areas, where significant gaps often exist. Another key aspect is providing adequate training and support to the ECD workforce, especially for those in the most remote locations and with limited connectivity. Colombia’s early education strategy, Conectar para Educar, provides pedagogical guidance, materials and resources to educational agents and families, aiming to strengthening their capacities. It also includes a remote training solution for caregivers, educators and preschool teachers via WhatsApp or the web, along with community communication strategies. To integrate this model into the country’s regular structure for comprehensive early childhood development services, the Bank has supported access to the strategy through the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) platform and through existing workforce training processes.

Projecting Sustainable Scaling of Home Visits in Brazil

Home visiting programs are a very effective way to ensure proper stimulation at home and child development among urban poor populations. Serving children in Brazil’s poor urban areas through this model has become a priority. A Bank-supported project in the city of Boa Vista aimed to scale up a previously evaluated home-visiting program by using trained early childhood development agents. This project incorporated an important innovation: training and support activities for parents without additional staff or increased time demands on mothers, by leveraging existing local group meetings. The target population includes pregnant women in the Bolsa Familia program starting at 21 weeks of pregnancy and children up to 36 months of age.

Investing in Quality Interactions in Family Support in Peru

Peru’s Cuna Más Program has been a pioneer in institutionalizing combined strategies for comprehensive early childhood development. Its Servicio de Acompañamiento a Familias (SAF) offers home visits in rural and remote areas to promote early childhood stimulation and parenting practices among families, while its Servicio de Cuidado Diurno (SCD) carries out educational activities in urban childcare centers. Various evaluations of this proven-impact program have shown the relationship between the quality of family-oriented programs and their effects on child development. In particular, they highlighted the importance of the number and quality of visits that facilitators make. Hence, the operation has funded technical assistance to improve the training and support processes for facilitators and their mentors, as well as the production of educational materials.

3 final ideas on pursuing effectiveness in early childhood development

Selecting only 10 operations from a large set of good experiences is as challenging as summarizing the rich evidence they provide on how to improve early childhood development.

Based on the cases presented, here are three key takeaways:

  • Process management and capacity building of the ECD workforce are essential for ensuring the quality of interventions, regardless of the modality.
  • An effective strategy for promoting early childhood development is one that offers various delivery modalities, simultaneously focusing on both coverage and quality.
  • Scaling up early childhood development services must be evidence-based. Only evaluations can demonstrate whether a modality is effective and identify the implementation conditions required for its success.

We encourage you to share these messages and reflect on how these principles have been applied in your country. To learn more about innovations in early childhood development, we invite you to visit the knowledge hub  we’ve created to share these experiences.


Filed Under: Policies and Programs Tagged With: child development, early childhood, Early Childhood Development, ECD, IDB, Inter American Development Bank, Social Protection

Marta Rubio-Codina

Marta Rubio-Codina is a Senior Economist in the Inter-American Development Bank’s Social Protection and Labor Markets Division, where she works on early child development projects. Previously she was a researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. She has a Doctorate in Economics from the Université de Toulouse in France.

Patricia Jara Males

Patricia Jara is a specialist in Chile in the Social Protection and Health Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Carolina Freire

Carolina Freire is a Social Protection and Labor Markets Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). She holds a bachelor’s degree in International Politics from Georgetown University and a master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Texas. She is a member of the Aspen Institute and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2012. She founded Voluntarios de Panamá, an organization that mobilizes and connects Panamanians with causes and organizations in need of their support.

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Early Childhood Development

The first years of life are essential to establish the future foundation of a person´s productivity and wellbeing. In this blog, experts from the IDB and thought leaders in the topic, share information and international experiences related to early childhood development. Join us to talk about initiatives implemented in your country in this area

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