Home visitors can have long-term impacts on a young child’s development – but it is challenging to deliver quality services at scale. To learn lessons, the Bernard van Leer Foundation has funded a case study of Cuna Más, a large-scale early childhood development programme established in Peru in 2012 to support families living in poverty with children aged under 3.
The study was carried out by the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), which is jointly led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA). It is the first to be published of several case studies ECWI is currently conducting.
Cuna Más enjoys relatively high coverage, and early results are promising: a recent impact evaluation by the Inter-American Development Bank found large effects on children’s cognitive and language development. Its experience offers lessons for other countries grappling with common challenges to ensuring the quality and sustainability of large-scale home visiting services, such as inadequate training, burdensome workloads, lack of supervision, poor wages, and other adverse conditions that can demotivate workers.
You can download the full report and the executive summary in English or Spanish here. To be notified of further news from the ECWI, sign up to their newsletter on their website.
