| By: |
Brinkman,Sally Anne;
Hasan,Amer;
Jung,Haeil;
Kinnell,Angela;
Pradhan,Menno Prasad |
| Abstract: |
This paper uses three waves of longitudinal data to examine the impact of
expanding access to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two
cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the start of the
project and was immediately eligible for project-provided services when they
began operation in 2009. The other cohort was children aged 1 at the start of
the project and became eligible for project-provided services two years later.
The paper presents intent-to-treat estimates of impact in the short term
(first year of the project) and medium term (three years after the project
started), using experimental and quasi-experimental methods. For the cohort of
4-year-olds, while the magnitude of the enrollment impact is similar across
children from different backgrounds, the impact on child outcomes is larger
for children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in the short and medium
terms. However, for this cohort of children, it seems that project-provided
playgroups encouraged substitution away from existing kindergartens,
suggesting that future interventions should incorporate such possibilities
into their design. For the average child in the younger cohort, the project
led to improvements in physical health and well-being as well as language and
cognitive development. For this cohort, there is little evidence of
differential impact. This can be explained by the fact that children who
enrolled soon after the centers opened (the older cohort) were generally
poorer, compared with children who enrolled later (the younger cohort). This
may be because of fee increases in project centers as project funding ended. |
| Keywords: |
Housing&Human Habitats,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Educational Sciences,Youth and Government,Primary Education |
| Date: |
2015–07–21 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7372&r=hap |