Scaling Early Childhood Development: What to read this month | February 2025

Scaling Early Childhood Development – what to read this month is curated by Bet Caeyers (Lead Editor, Chr. Michelsen Institute), Meghan Taylor (Editor, Oxford Policy Management) and Daniel Munday (Editor, Oxford Policy Management).

Let’s delve straight in! How do we address what John List has coined the ‘voltage drop’ when scaling? Voltage drop is the phenomenon where the effectiveness of an intervention or policy decreases significantly when it is scaled up from small, controlled settings to larger and more complex settings. In his recent Vox Dev article, List highlights a common pitfall: policymakers often emphasise ‘evidence-based policies’ while overlooking their relevance in diverse contexts. What’s the solution? List argues that we must ‘optimally generate policy-based evidence before decision-makers commit to scaling and continue to do so throughout the policy’s lifecycle’. This involves using backward induction to identify major threats to successful scaling and devising strategies to mitigate them. For more on what List identifies as the five biggest threats to scaling (aka ‘vital signs’) check out his excellent book, The Voltage Effect.

Scheidecker et al. take a bold stance on universal child feeding recommendations, challenging the idea that the World Health Organization (WHO)’s responsive feeding practices are universally superior. They argue that responsive feeding, which emphasises eye contact and verbal interaction, overlooks the value of non-responsive feeding, where feeding itself is seen as an expression of love and care. The authors highlight the ‘shaky evidence’ supporting responsive feeding’s dominance in early childhood development (ECD) guidelines, pointing out the lack of robust randomised control trial studies. Ethnographic research from countries like Ghana, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh reveals that non-responsive feeding practices are prevalent and crucial for social development, often sidelined by Western-centric views. More generally, they call for a greater appreciation of ethnographic approaches in global health and ECD research, suggesting that this inclusion can lead to more diverse and inclusive knowledge about effective feeding practices worldwide.

Yet another critical perspective this month: Can growth monitoring and promotion really tell us if kids are growing right? Growth monitoring and promotion is the commonly used process of taking regular anthropometric measurements to check if the child’s physical growth development is on track. But a new article from Leroy reveals that our go-to measurements, like weight-for-age and height-for-age, can be all over the place. In Belgium, a whopping 97% of kids could be labelled as ‘not growing right’ just due to normal fluctuations. Additionally, longitudinal data show that these tools are not great at predicting future growth problems and often leave marginalised groups out of the picture, making growth monitoring and promotion also fall short in terms of population tracking. The real goal? Improving kids’ nutrition, health and development. The authors argue it’s time to rethink how growth monitoring and promotion can contribute to this mission, with fresh research and active stakeholder engagement.

What is happening with preschool enrolment worldwide? According to a new paper by van Ravens and Crouch, there has been a slowdown in pre-primary education enrolment growth across all income levels, albeit at different rates (See Figure 1). From 1997 to 2017, middle-income countries saw preschool enrolment climb by two percentage points each year, while low-income countries averaged only 13 percentage points over 50 years. Enrolment has now stalled at about 78% in upper-middle-income countries, 58% in lower-middle-income nations and under 20% in low-income areas. Although it might be tempting to blame the post-2020 slowdown on COVID-19, the authors suggest that the real issue lies within the education system itself. To turn things around, they call for robust policies on preschool access, along with more research into unregistered preschools and hidden enrolment.

Figure 1: Pre-primary education gross enrolment, global and by income group (1990-2020). Source: Compiled by Van Ravens and Crouch (2025) using data from World Bank.

Talking about pre-school education, let’s spotlight some new Thrive research! A new Thrive policy brief by Anamuah-Mensah et al. uses data from Ghana to suggest that strengthening community engagement and improving stressful working conditions could lead to increased levels of respect (and likely quality of teaching) felt by kindergarten teachers. Meanwhile, Quendar et al. used this same dataset to examine disabilities in Ghanaian pre-school classrooms. Findings show that 76% of headteachers report no kids with disabilities in their schools, and over half say parents are not invested in these children’s education. Even a quarter of headteachers feel helpless about making a difference. This calls for better screening and awareness raising at all levels coupled with capacity building for teachers to ensure children with disabilities can participate and benefit from school settings.

What is today’s consensus regarding essential knowledge, skills and competencies for non-certified community-based early childhood development service paraprofessionals? Pearson and Opoku asked this question to a variety of ECD experts. Essential areas include training on a holistic understanding of ECD, including development benchmarks, knowledge of early nutrition and knowledge on promoting socio-emotional skills in young children. Across all role types, experts emphasised the importance of cultural sensitivities, empathy and an ability to connect with parents to impart ECD knowledge and good practices. The development of such essential capacity factors should be factored into the implementation and scaling of ECD programmes across LMICs.

Also on the topic of quality of delivery of non-specialist ECD providers, Bond et al.’s new study points out that very little empirical examination has occurred of factors associated with quality of delivery as captured by fidelity and competence scores. Whereas there is some evidence on the importance of modifiable factors like training and supervision, the role of non-modifiable traits (such as provider demographics) is overlooked. Using data from the Sugira Muryango programme in Rwanda, the authors explore how non-modifiable characteristics of non-specialist service providers (age, gender, district of residence and education) – are associated with fidelity and competence overtime. Notably, older providers start off with stronger competence and fidelity but show less growth compared to younger ones. This underscores the need to consider both modifiable and non-modifiable factors in programme design to improve delivery quality.

Where do we stand on digital parenting interventions? Jäggi et al.’s scoping review dives into the evidence on digital and hybrid parenting interventions, exploring their feasibility, adaptability and impact on child development and parental outcomes. Out of the 13 studies analysed, hybrid approaches – those that combine in-person support with digital tools – shone brighter than their purely digital counterparts. By leveraging digital tools for training, monitoring, and screening, hybrid models successfully expanded the reach and quality of interventions. In contrast, digital-only interventions often relied on passive, one-way communication and missed out on interactive technologies like AI. While positive effects on parenting behaviours and knowledge were noted, there is a lack of evidence on impacts on ECD outcomes. Additionally, critical issues such as acceptance, adoption and sustained use of the interventions remain largely unaddressed. The digital parenting landscape is evolving, but there’s still significant work ahead.

How to enable scaling up of parenting support to prevent violence against children? A new paper by van Tuyll van Serooskereken Rakotomalala et al. identifies the following enabling factors: the existing political commitment and enabling policy environment, the interventions currently on offer at the programmatic level, and the perceived understanding of the importance of parenting among Tanzanian parents and their expected willingness to change. Implications for practice can be boiled down to needing better dissemination and sensitisation of policy, a more targeted approach to parenting interventions which takes context into account, and finally, the affordability of programming.

Promising new research by Sim et al. uses an innovative way to curb violence against children among displaced populations. Recognising a major gap in the evidence on scaling positive parenting interventions in low-resource settings, they trialled a film intervention across 44 displaced communities along the Thai/Myanmar border. The film showcased real parenting hurdles while highlighting both good and bad practices, sparking group discussions and reinforcing key messages with fun posters on positive parenting. And the outcome? A 9% drop in physical violence against children. Plus, caregivers reported improved parenting know-how, stronger family functioning and better social support. This shows that a simple, fun intervention can pack a punch, proving both effective and affordable for widespread change in positive parenting practices in LMICs. For a recent systematic review by Younas and Gutman, on parental child maltreatment interventions, see here (although note the lack of evidence available from LMIC settings).

Finally, on measurement, Jeong et al. developed and validated an observational tool to assess mother-child and father-child interactions and their effect on ECD outcomes across LMICs – noting that most existing tools have only been validated on mother-child interactions. The need for an accurate and validated father-child tool is pressing given the body of evidence highlighting the difference – and subsequently the possible variance in ECD outcomes – in parenting style between mothers and fathers in LMICs (see here and here, for example). The study finds that positive interaction with mothers supports child expressive language development and fine motor skills, while interactions with fathers were associated with receptive language development and fine motor skills. For ECD scaling, the team stress the need for further research in gender differences for parenting outcomes, and for further gender-specific studies to be undertaken in other LMICs, to assess whether cultural context around gender also plays a role in ECD outcomes.