The Impact of Expanding Access to Early Childhood Services in Rural Indonesia : Evidence from Two Cohorts of Children
This paper uses three waves of longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the start of the project and was immediately...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/07/24808116/impact-expanding-access-early-childhood-services-rural-indonesia-evidence-two-cohorts-children http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22456 |
| Summary: | This paper uses three waves of
longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access
to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two
cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the
start of the project and was immediately eligible for
project-provided services when they began operation in 2009.
The other cohort was children aged 1 at the start of the
project and became eligible for project-provided services
two years later. The paper presents intent-to-treat
estimates of impact in the short term (first year of the
project) and medium term (three years after the project
started), using experimental and quasi-experimental methods.
For the cohort of 4-year-olds, while the magnitude of the
enrollment impact is similar across children from different
backgrounds, the impact on child outcomes is larger for
children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in the short
and medium terms. However, for this cohort of children, it
seems that project-provided playgroups encouraged
substitution away from existing kindergartens, suggesting
that future interventions should incorporate such
possibilities into their design. For the average child in
the younger cohort, the project led to improvements in
physical health and well-being as well as language and
cognitive development. For this cohort, there is little
evidence of differential impact. This can be explained by
the fact that children who enrolled soon after the centers
opened (the older cohort) were generally poorer, compared
with children who enrolled later (the younger cohort). This
may be because of fee increases in project centers as
project funding ended. |
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