Technology-assisted Caregiver Program: Cost-effectiveness evaluation on school readiness and child development

Preschool services in India fail to ensure school readiness and lack of parental stimulation in the home contributes to deficits in child development. These factors lead to longer-term underperformance and contribute to the perpetuation of poverty. Our technology-assisted Caregiver Program promotes parental and preschool teachers' awareness and engagement with the children by introducing stimulating play activities, conversations, and emotional and nutritional support to reinforce appropriate behaviors. While the focus for the parents and teachers is behavioral change, the activities for the children aged 3 and 4 years old are designed towards building the key elements of development: early literacy and numeracy, cognition, executive functioning, socioemotional, and nutrition. It is designed to be immediately scalable by empowering local resources and not reliant on new expenditures but only on changes in behavior. It will be tested by a large-scale cluster Randomized Controlled Trial across 160 public preschools to better understand the mechanisms of change, pathways to scale, and its generalizability.