Congratulations to all those involved in launching the Nutrition & Early Years Advisory Group (NEYAG), which was inaugurated on December 4, 2025 at a meeting titled: “Shaping the Future of Africa: Nutrition and Early Childhood Development as Game Changers.”

Hosted in Dakar by the World Bank and partners, the meeting brought together leaders across sectors to advance strategies that strengthen human capital through improved nutrition and early childhood development. 

At the event today, our Director, Florencia Lopez Boo, shared insights from Global TIES for Children’s research portfolio on how to integrate health, nutrition, and child development policies, highlighting evidence on what policy environment is needed to enable such integration and what governance structures and regulations can inform impactful, scalable policies across the continent.

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 in Brazil. 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.