Early Child Development clinical trials

Family and Childhood Development: The Next Generation ('Kizazi Kijacho')

Digital solutions can significantly improve the delivery of Early Childhood Development (ECD) services in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Traditional home-visits and community group-based parenting approaches require intense levels of training, mentoring and supervision of Community Health Workers (CHWs) that is difficult to sustain when transitioning to scale. Context relevant digital tools can support CHWs in delivering high-quality, respectful, and standardised multi-sectoral household ECD services by tailoring services to pregnant women and engaging male caregivers. This could have significant impacts on child development, including stimulation, speech and language development, nutrition, and cognition. Moreover, cash delivered through digital modes of payment is faster, safer, easier to administer, is scalable and has potential to empower women, influence parental investment and affect household decision making. The study will conduct a clustered multi-arm Randomised Controlled Trial (cRCT) targeting pregnant mothers across all 7 districts (and all 8 district councils) in the Dodoma region in Tanzania. Following the study sample for 15 months from 5-7 months pregnancy. The study will test and compare the causal effects of (i) a digitally supported Parenting Intervention delivered by CHWs, which aims to improve caregivers' access to quality ECD services; (ii) a mobile unconditional cash transfer which aims to relax financial resource constraints; and (iii) a digitally supported Parenting Intervention when combined with a mobile unconditional cash transfer. Findings from the study are expected to have important policy implications for the design of scalable ECD interventions targeting pregnant mothers in Tanzania and other LMIC settings.