About this session

Saturday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

How do interventions work and for whom? Evidence from the Global South

While early child development interventions have been found to improve early child development outcomes across a variety of countries and contexts in the Global South, less is known about the mechanisms of these interventions, and for whom they work best. While prior work informs program-level characteristics that promote intervention effectiveness (Jeong et al. 2021; Jervis et al. 2023), it lacks the context-specific within-intervention information required to adapt existing interventions to function optimally within a specific context. Understanding the elements of interventions that drive intervention effectiveness, as well as factors that moderate these effects within targeted populations is critical to adapting and refining effective interventions that can be efficiently delivered at scale.

This panel brings together innovative research from four different rural contexts examining a range of pathways of intervention effectiveness and moderators of early child development interventions impact in the Global South. The first evaluation, from China, investigates the moderating role that caregiver mental health plays in the impact of a stimulation intervention. The second, from Madagascar, investigates village and individual-level moderators of participation in a community health worker delivered early child development intervention. The third intervention, from Bangladesh, uncovers the mechanisms by which an early WASH and nutrition intervention impacts child development at 7 years of age. And the fourth, from Kenya, examines the pathways through which a group-based parenting intervention improved children’s development outcomes. Together this work aims to inform the design of effective scalable interventions to improve child development.

Paper #1
Title	The Moderating Role of Caregiver Mental Health in Parenting Stimulation Interventions in LMICs
Presenting author	Qi Jiang, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, United States

Paper #2
Title	"The difficulty of life”: shocks as moderators of ECD intervention implementation
Presenting author	Eleanor Tsai, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, United States

Paper #3
Title	How do WASH and Nutrition interventions work to improve child development? Evidence from Bangladesh
Presenting author	Helen Osborne Pitchik, Ph.D., UC Berkeley School of Public Health, United States

Paper #4
Title	Pathways of Change in Early Childhood Development: Evidence from a parenting intervention in rural Kenya
Presenting author	Douglas Newball-Ramirez, University of Southern California, United States

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Session chairs
Helen Osborne Pitchik, Ph.D., UC Berkeley School of Public Health, United States; Joshua Jeong, , United States

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