Globally, preschool enrollment has surged, but its quality is often poor. We evaluate strategies to improve quality of public preschools in Colombia. The first, designed by the government and rolled out nationwide, provided extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants. The second also offered low-cost training for existing teachers. The first intervention had no effect on child development, while the second improved children’s cognitive development, especially for more disadvantaged children. This pattern can be explained by the interventions affecting teachers' behavior differently. The first led teachers to reduce their classroom time, including learning activities, while additional training offset the adverse effect on learning activities and improved teaching quality.
Globally, preschool enrollment has surged, but its quality is often poor. We evaluate strategies to improve quality of public preschools in Colombia. The first, designed by the government and rolled out nationwide, provided extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants. The second also offered low-cost training for existing teachers. The first intervention had no effect on child development, while the second improved children’s cognitive development, especially for more disadvantaged children. This pattern can be explained by the interventions affecting teachers' behavior differently. The first led teachers to reduce their classroom time, including learning activities, while additional training offset the adverse effect on learning activities and improved teaching quality.
Many children in developing countries grow up in environments that lack stimulation, leading to deficiencies in early years of development. Several efficacy trials of early childhood care and education (ECCE) programmes have demonstrated potential to improve child development; evidence on whether these effects can be sustained once programmes are scaled is much more mixed. This study evaluates whether an ECCE programme shown to be effective in an efficacy trial maintains effectiveness when taken to scale by the Government of Ghana (GoG). The findings will provide critical evidence to the GoG on effectiveness of a programme it is investing in, as well as a blueprint for design and scale-up of ECCE programmes in other developing countries, which are expanding their investment in ECCE programmes.
This paper uses a dataset from Tanzania with information on consumption, income, and income shocks within and across family networks. Crucially and uniquely, it also contains data on the degree of information existing between each pair of households within family networks. We use these data to construct a novel measure of the quality of information both at the level of household pairs and at the level of the network. We also note that the individual level measures can be interpreted as measures of network centrality. We study risk sharing within these networks and explore whether the rejection of perfect risk sharing that we observe can be related to our measures of information quality. We show that households within family networks with better information are less vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks. Furthermore, we show that more central households within networks are less vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks. These results have important implications for the characterisation of the empirical failure of the perfect risk-sharing hypothesis and point to the importance of information frictions.