Delivering early-childhood programs at scale is a major policy challenge. One way to do so is by using existing public infrastructure. This paper experimentally assesses the short-term effects of a new government home-visiting program integrated into health-care services. The program changed the allocation of time for community health workers by asking them to carry out tasks related to early-childhood development. We find that access to the program has a positive but modest effect on home environment quality and no effect on child development or on children’s health status. Our results point to the importance of workload, supervision, and buy-in from delivery actors to enhance fidelity of interventions.

As part of the Play to Learn initiative, with funding from the LEGO foundation, BRAC and Sesame Workshop designed a 6-month fathers’ engagement component to be added to an existing parenting intervention for mothers. The program was developed for fathers of children aged 0-3 in the Rohingya camps and surrounding host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and focuses on mental health, responsive caregiving, and engagement with family. As part of an impact evaluation of the intervention1, we at Global TIES, New York University, developed an instrument to measure the quality of the intervention delivery.

This brief discusses the importance of measuring quality, the process of developing and implementing this quality instrument, and the preliminary analysis of data collected using it. In addition to informing the impact evaluation, a broader goal of this work is to contribute to the emerging knowledge on measuring program quality and fidelity, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMIC) and emergency contexts, and better understand “how” and “why” parenting programs in these contexts do or do not work.