Bangladesh : Can Child Stimulation Messages Be Added to an Existing Platform for Delivering Health and Nutrition Information?
Development institutions and governments agree on the need to start early when it comes to children’s healthy development. Early childhood is a critical time for both the brain and body, and it’s important that children receive appropriate nutritio...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/460751510225499119/Bangladesh-Can-child-stimulation-messages-be-added-to-an-existing-platform-for-delivering-health-and-nutrition-information http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28862 |
| Summary: | Development institutions and governments
agree on the need to start early when it comes to children’s
healthy development. Early childhood is a critical time for
both the brain and body, and it’s important that children
receive appropriate nutrition, health, stimulation and
socio-emotional support in this period. But child
development programs can be expensive and complicatedto
deliver—especially when they include home visits to show
caregivers how to stimulate healthy development—and it’s
still not clear how best to design and deliver
cost-effective programs in low-income areas. For example:
Can information about best practices for keeping children
healthy and stimulated successfully be delivered through
established programs, like cash transfers or health
services? What sort of training and mentoring is needed for
successful home visits and can these be made cost-effective?
The Government of Bangladesh is working with a variety of
partners on initiatives to improve early childhood
development and provide the country’s youngest citizens with
a good start. Save the Children, an international
non-governmental organization,designed and implemented a
pilot program to provide new mothers with child development
information during their visits to community health clinics
and during regular home visits by health workers and family
welfare assistants. The World Bank’s Strategic Impact
Evaluation Fund (SIEF) supported an evaluation of the
program to test the impact of adding this child stimulation
component to a national nutrition program. The evaluation
found that almost all families that received the program’s
services, including informational cards on child development
and picture books, reported using them, and their children
showed small to modest gains in cognitive, linguistic and
physical development compared with children whose families
were not offered the program. The results show that it is
possible to supplement existing health and nutrition
programs with an additional component to improve children’s
cognitive development in the early years, before they start
any formal school program. However, almost 50 percent of
households didn’t get the materials as expected,
underscoring the challenges of using an already existing
system of government community clinics and community
outreach to deliver additional services. As policymakers in
Bangladesh and in other countries seek successful approaches
for supporting healthy child development, this evaluation
provides promising evidence that the health sector can be
used to improve young children’s development but also a
cautionary lesson in the challenges of broadening existing
health programs to include other components. |
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