Subsidized childcare and child development in Colombia: Effects of Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar as a function of timing and length of exposure
Highlights
► We estimated effects of length of exposure to the largest public childcare program in Colombia on children's development. ► We found modest effects of the program on children's cognitive and socioemotional development but not on nutritional status. ► Scores on cognitive development were up to 0.3 SD higher for older children exposed to the HCB program 15 months or longer. ► Older children exposed to the HCB program for at least 15 months exhibited less withdrawal and isolation behaviors. ► The estimated benefit-cost ratio suggests that the HCB program may potentially afford beneficiaries a modest increase future earnings.
Section snippets
Study design
As part of the HCB program evaluation, data was collected from February to July 2007 on a sample of 1042 HCB childcare homes, 12,216 program beneficiary children, and 13,321 non-beneficiary comparison children nationwide. By the time the evaluation was conducted, the HCB program had been operating for almost 20 years and had reached all geographic areas of the country. Therefore, the treatment could not be randomly assigned. The HCB evaluation procedures were considered of minimal risk to
Results
In this section, we present general descriptive statistics on the sample, estimates of program effects on beneficiary children with different exposure levels compared to children with less than a month of program exposure, and benefit-cost estimates. In Table 2 we present descriptive statistics of the observed family and child characteristics (top panel) and child outcome variables (lower panel) used in the analysis by group (treatment and control). In Table 3, Table 4, Table 5 we present
Discussion
In sum, we found modest positive effects on children's cognitive and socio-emotional development for older children that were exposed to the HCB program for more than 15 months. These effects represent important increases in cognitive ability test scores ranging from 4% to 5.4%, and close to 8% for socio-emotional development scores. This evidence supports the hypothesis that program effects would be greater for children who entered earlier and stayed longer in the HCB program (Behrman et al.,
Acknowledgments
This study is based on the evaluation of the program Hogares Communitarios de Bienestar conducted by the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Económico (CEDE) at Universidad de los Andes in partnership with Profamilia. It was funded by the United Nations Development Programme through the Departamento de Planeación Nacional de Colombia and by the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (ICBF). The authors gratefully thank Alejandro Gaviria, Carmen Elisa Flórez, Paul René Ocampo, Belén
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