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The primary purpose of this toolkit is to provide a resource for researchers from various disciplines interested in planning and evaluating programs or interventions aimed at improving the health and development of infants and young children. The toolkit aims to: provide an overview of issues affecting early development and its measurement; discuss the types of tests typically used with children under five years; provide guidelines for selecting and adapting tests for use in developing countries, and make recommendations for planning successful assessment strategies. The toolkit focuses on children who have not yet entered school, and are thus under six years old. The primary reason we are focusing on this age group is that during the first five years of life, children's language, early understanding of mathematics and reading, and self-control emerge. The extent to which children master these skills during this critical period has implications for success in school (Lerner, 1998), and thus we wanted to focus on children in this pre-school period. The toolkit is essential at this time for the following reasons: children in developing countries are growing up at a disadvantage; assessments of children must expand to include a wider range of outcomes; and no such toolkit exists as present.

Adaptation --- Cognitive Development --- Communication Skills --- Curriculum --- Early Childhood --- Early Childhood Development --- Early Childhood Education --- Education --- Gender --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Infancy --- Kindergarten --- Literacy --- Mental Health --- Nutrition --- Primary Education --- Quality Control --- Reading --- Schools --- Social Skills --- Speech --- Teachers --- Violence --- Wages --- Workers

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Intensive and controversial marketing of infant formula is believed to be responsible for millions of infant deaths in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet to date there have been no rigorous analyses that quantify these effects. To estimate the impact of infant formula on infant mortality, we pair country-specific data from the annual corporate reports of Nestlé, the largest producer of infant formula, with a sample of 2.48 million births in 46 LMICs from 1970-2011. Our key finding is that the availability of formula increased infant mortality by 9.4 per 1000 births, 95%CI [3.6, 15.6] among mothers without access to clean water, suggesting that unclean water acted as a vector for the transmission of water-borne pathogens to infants. We estimate that the availability of formula in LIMCs resulted in approximately 66,000 infant deaths in 1981 at the peak of the infant formula controversy.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper evaluates a government program in Malawi, which aimed to improve quality at community-based childcare centers and complemented these efforts with a group-based parenting support program. Children in the integrated intervention arm (teacher training and parenting) had significantly higher scores in measures of language and socio-emotional development than children in centers receiving teacher training alone at the 18-month follow-up. However, the study finds no effects on child assessments at the 36-month follow-up. Significant improvements at the centers relating to classroom organization and teacher behavior in the teacher-training only arm did not translate into improvements in child outcomes at either follow-up. The findings suggest that, in resource-poor settings with informal preschools, programs that integrate parenting support within preschools may be more effective than programs that simply improve classroom quality.

Early Childhood Development --- Education --- Parenting Education --- Preschool Teacher Training

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Parents play a crucial role in the promotion of early childhood development, and understanding parental perceptions of early childhood development may help enhance parental investments early in life. To explore this question, caregivers were asked to rank their child's intelligence in comparison with other children in the community, and the rankings were compared with children's scores on an assessment of developmental abilities across multiple domains. Using cross-sectional data on children ages 16-42 months in rural Madagascar, this paper documents the discordance between caregivers' perceived early childhood development with an interviewer-based measure of early childhood development. The paper examines the determinants of caregivers' under- and over-estimation of child development using multinomial logistic regressions. The study finds that caregiver perceptions of early childhood development in Madagascar do not align consistently with an interviewer-based measure. Approximately 8 percent of the caregivers under-estimated and almost 50 percent over-estimated their children's abilities. Better child nutritional status, caregivers with a greater belief in their influence on child intelligence, and higher socioeconomic status were associated with lower odds of under- or over-estimation of early childhood development. Further research is needed to understand the common cues that caregivers use to identify child development milestones, to inform the design of parenting interventions.

Caregiver Perceptions --- Early Child Development --- Early Childhood Development --- Education