Scaling Early Childhood Development – what to read this month | January 2026

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).

Lopez Boo et al. provide rare large-scale experimental evidence on both the effectiveness of a government-led parenting intervention at scale and the mechanisms for strengthening implementation quality. The study evaluates a home-visiting programme in Nicaragua, where trained community workers conducted bi-weekly visits with families of children under 3, offering coaching on early stimulation and responsive caregiving alongside health information. Four years after launch, children in treatment areas showed gains of 0.11 standard deviations in overall development and a 7-percentage point increase in preschool completion, yielding a highly cost-effective programme with a 5:1 benefit-cost ratio. Crucially, random assignment to central versus community-led monitoring shows that community monitoring significantly improved visit quality, suggesting it is a powerful tool to maximise the effect of home-visit programmes at scale.

Addressing a key evidence gap on the quality of employer-provided childcare at scale, Salveen et al. (Thrive programme) published a brief on childcare provision in Bangladesh´s ready-made garment industry, which employs over 4 million people, most of them women. The study draws on a survey of 800 women across 40 factories, complemented by interviews with daycare staff and users and observations in 43 factory-based centres. While daycare use is associated with better maternal wellbeing, the findings reveal wide disparities in centre quality: over 80% lacked adequate furniture, toys and learning materials; 95% were rated poorly on hygiene and sanitation; and caregiver training was limited. Some mothers reported safety concerns, and factory managers often lacked clarity on what constitutes quality provision. The authors call for stronger government regulation, including minimum standards and a national registry of centres, alongside a structured training curriculum for caregivers and stronger cross-sector coordination.

Mani and Theiss present comparative evidence on effective strategies to improve pre-primary education quality in low-income settings, through a systematic review of six interventions across Africa, including programmes in Ghana, The Gambia, Mozambique, Kenya and Malawi. The interventions primarily focus on training teachers in pre-schools and early childhood development centres, with most also incorporating parent education components. One to two years after programme inception, the review finds average improvements of 0.10 standard deviations in children’s cognitive outcomes and 0.09 standard deviations in socioemotional development. The authors conclude that combining teacher training with parent-based education may generate larger and more sustained gains, provided parenting interventions are carefully implemented by qualified personnel who can effectively engage caregivers with low levels of education or literacy.

Offering rare long-run evidence on the returns to early childhood development investment, Berlinski et al. examine the 1990s expansion of universal pre-primary education in Argentina, when the government constructed new preschools in high-poverty, low-enrolment areas, creating around 186,000 places. The study finds substantial long-term benefits for children who attended pre-primary education, including a 7% increase in secondary school enrolment and a 10% reduction in teenage pregnancy, alongside higher participation in post-secondary education and associated expected wage gains. A benefit-cost analysis shows that, following initial construction, operating costs were low relative to returns, yielding a high benefit-cost ratio of 10.98, with benefits continuing to outweigh costs even under higher cost assumptions.

Advancing the evidence on teacher motivation and retention in early education, Thrive shares two new papers examining the drivers of kindergarten teacher demotivation. Colombé and Augsburg introduce a working paper developing a ‘demotivation framework’ (see Figure 1), drawing on theories of job demands, resourcing, career satisfaction and resilience. The framework traces motivation from pre-service and in-service stages through to burnout and contract renewal or exit, offering a structured way to examine how personal, school-level and external factors shape teacher trajectories. Applying this framework, Anamuah-Mensah et al. study pre-school teacher motivation in northern Ghana and find that nearly half show signs of emotional exhaustion, driven primarily by poor working conditions and job strain rather than personal factors. Community respect, professional development and adequate resourcing were associated with lower exhaustion, highlighting the need to address structural mismatches between job demands and support to improve teacher wellbeing and retention.

Another Thrive working paper and brief contribute novel knowledge on how complex public health programmes can be rolled out at scale, and what it takes for frontline workers to deliver better quality care. Bancalari et al. examine Ghana’s Obstetric Triage Implementation Programme (OTIP), developed by the Ghana Health Service and Kybele to address high maternal and neonatal mortality. OTIP introduces a structured obstetric triage system in hospitals, with a midwife ‘champion’ training their peers, encouraging adherence to triage procedures, and helping establish and maintain dedicated triage areas. A large-scale rollout across Ghana found that OTIP significantly improved midwives’ clinical knowledge and their ability to identify high-risk cases, though first-come, first-served practices and limited awareness of recommended waiting times persisted, highlighting the need for sustained support.

A recent World Bank working paper highlights the importance of combining income support with behavioural change interventions, while showing that light-touch approaches are not sufficient to generate sustained impacts. In a large, randomised trial across 225 rural villages in Burkina Faso, households received unconditional cash transfers alone or combined with parenting support, including information sessions and, in the most intensive arm, regular home visits. Fifteen months after programme closure, only the full cash plus package with home visits showed sustained impacts on child development and caregiving practices, while cash-only and lighter-touch arms showed little lasting effect. Given that home visits are time-intensive and relatively costly to implement, understanding their added value relative to cash transfers or group information meetings is crucial for designing cost-effective interventions.

Smyth et al. call for shifting childhood disability services away from impairment-focused models towards children’s self-reported quality of life. Drawing on the ‘F-words for child development’ (functioning, family, fitness, fun, friends and future), they argue that quality of life should be assessed through children’s own experiences of participation, belonging and satisfaction rather than ableist proxy measures of function. The paper discusses the ‘disability paradox’, where children may report high life satisfaction despite significant impairments, often contradicting caregiver assessments and misdirecting support. The authors conclude that disability-inclusive health systems should use mixed methods to capture quality of life, recognising the whole child, including family, values and aspirations.

We conclude with a paper from Thrive Tanzania on women’s empowerment. Almås et al. conclude that carefully targeted cash transfers can increase women’s control over resources and decision making but that gains are constrained when women face barriers to mobile phone ownership, digital literacy and confidence, and safe digital access. This underscores the need to design mobile cash transfer systems that explicitly tackle gendered constraints rather than assuming technology is neutral at the risk of the reinforcing, rather than reducing, gender inequality.