​Autor: Todd Pugatch (Oregon State University)

Paper: Improving Parental Investments in Children: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia

Abstract: We study a large scale early childhood program taking place in two regions of the Gambia, targeting children between 0 and 3 years of age. Two versions of the program, which are experimentally assigned to different villages, are analysed along with an experimental control group. The basic version of the program provides child health and nutrition information to parents of young children, through home visits, and sporadic community meetings. The intensive version of the program enriched the home visits with added information about child stimulation, and provided more frequent and structured community meetings than the basic version. Furthermore, the group meetings in the intensive version were attended by parents and children, and include direct stimulation to children. There were moderate impacts of the intensive program on parental investments and child language development, occurring primarily in one of the regions in our study, which was more advantaged to start with. There were no detectable impacts of the basic version of the program.