Recently, there has been an increasing interest in ECD interventions as a means of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and of offering better opportunities to children born in deprived environments. But can the interventions be effective? How do parents react to these interventions? And what are the challenges of scaling up?
In this paper we review the results from two ECD interventions, one in Colombia and one in India. We then describe a framework for understanding how these interventions work and present results in this respect from Colombia. We find important short run effects on cognition and language. We also find that the interventions operate by shifting the way mothers invest in their children, which seem to underlie the success of the interventions.
With: Alison Andrews, Orazio Attanasio, Britta Augsburg, Sally Grantham McGregor, and Marta Rubio-Codina
