Global evidence suggests that small-scale home-visit and community group-based parenting approaches delivered by community health workers are promising child development interventions. This project aims to identify scalable ways to effectively guide and mentor community health workers when delivering complex, integrated early childhood development services.
The evidenced success of approaches delivered by community health workers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) hinges on concentrated training, mentoring and supervision that is not sustainable at scale. Rigorous evidence is needed on the impact of innovative solutions to support frontline workers to deliver high-quality household holistic early childhood development services.
To address knowledge gaps, this project leverages the randomised control trial (RCT) infrastructure of Kizazi Kijacho, an ongoing, collaborative six-year early childhood development research programme in Tanzania led by the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University.
The RCT was originally designed to compare the relative effectiveness of a parenting intervention (delivered by existing community health workers supported by a digital app) and an unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programme.
Thrive is tapping into existing government community health worker supervision structures to reflect how a scaled-up version of the programme would look. The project’s activities will include the following:
- we will scale up the parenting programme to 160 communities spread across all eight district councils in the Dodoma region in Tanzania
- we will recruit and train 80 existing health care workers to supervise and mentor the community health workers in their respective catchment areas
- we will deliver a UCT to a sub-set of families, creating a new parenting + UCT treatment arm. The UCT amounts will be calibrated to the cash transfer amounts disbursed by the Tanzanian government as part of its existing flagship social protection programme, Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF).
Results will inform government decision-making in Tanzania and similar LMICs worldwide on whether and when the two types of interventions should be combined or implemented in isolation
we will include a costing study to inform decision-making on the choice of interventions to be replicated or scaled up.
This project will refine the understanding of parental investment in child development and provide evidence for designing effective, holistic, scalable, and sustainable child development interventions. Findings could go on to inform early childhood development guidelines and strategies nationally.