First Study to Calculate the Internal Rate of Return for an Early Childhood Program in a Developing Country

New publication announcement with a preview of the published journal article.

Research led by Global TIES for Children's Florencia Lopez Boo finds one of the strongest benefit-cost ratios recorded for an early childhood intervention.

A new peer-reviewed study published last week in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Cambridge University Press)  (Cambridge University Press) provides the first internal rate of return (IRR) for an early childhood development program calculated using data from a low- or middle-income country (LMIC), extending an evidence base that has relied almost exclusively on high-income-country studies for more than a decade.

The paper, "Estimating the Internal Rate of Return of the Influential Jamaica Early Childhood Intervention," is co-authored by Florencia Lopez Boo, Director of Global TIES for Children at NYU, and Nicolás Alejandro García Balus of the Inter-American Development Bank's Social Protection and Labor Markets division.

The authors draw on longitudinal outcome data from Reach Up and Learn, the Jamaica-born home-visiting model that has since become a reference point for early stimulation programs across Latin America and the Caribbean. Using labor market outcomes measured when study participants were 22 and 31 years old, together with program cost data published in 2023, the study estimates an internal rate of return of 10.4–10.7% and a benefit-cost ratio of ~8 — meaning every dollar invested in the program returned roughly eight dollars in economic benefits, one of the strongest returns recorded in the early childhood literature.

The study also finds that economic returns were higher for women (11.5%) than for men (9.6%), a pattern that runs counter to most findings from U.S.-based studies of similar programs.

Until now, virtually every published rate of return for early childhood investment — including the long-cited Perry Preschool and Abecedarian estimates — was generated in the United States. This study is the first to build a comparable estimate entirely from LMIC data, giving policymakers in the region a return-on-investment figure grounded in outcomes from a country in Latin America and the Caribbean rather than one extrapolated from elsewhere.

The paper is open access and available in full at doi.org/10.1017/bca.2026.10055