Strengthening Learning and Child Development in Brazilian Preschools

Although the vast majority of four to five-year-old children in Brazil already attend preschool (91.5 percent in 2022), there are still important challenges regarding the quality of the education offered.  

J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and Fundação Bracell are joining forces to address some of these challenges in Bahia, Mato Grosso do Sul, and São Paulo through the project “Strengthening Learning and Child Development in Brazilian Preschools.” The project seeks to identify promising preschool programs, evaluate their effectiveness, and support the scale-up of those that actually improve the outcomes of children. 

We are interested in programs that are sustainable in time and can eventually be expanded. Therefore, we will bring together organizations that have developed promising programs, state and municipal governments that are interested in having those programs in their schools, and academics that can evaluate the programs and help to improve them.

The project has three phases:

• Phase 1: Diagnostic. To have a good diagnostic of the status of early childhood education in Brazil we will establish relationships with state and municipal secretariats of education, review socio-demographic and educational indicators in Brazil, map the existing literature, review successful experiences around the world, and identify organizations implementing preschool programs in Brazil.
• Phase 2: Evaluation of pilots. We will open a call for proposals to nonprofit organizations and universities implementing programs on preschool education, to apply to receive funding to implement and evaluate their solution in collaboration with municipalities, states. and J-PAL researchers. This will be complemented with trainings to fine-tune the programs and prepare the municipalities and implementing organizations for the evaluation.
• Phase 3: Support for scale-up. We will support the programs that are proven effective to get to the next level. This includes evaluating them in new contexts (if needed) and providing technical support for their scale-up in partnership with states. 

How can organizations implementing programs participate in the project?

To set the ground for the evaluations, we will have an introductory training on impact evaluations, evidence use, and theory of change. Organizations and universities implementing programs on preschool education can apply for the training, explaining the program which they would like to evaluate; if we have more applicants than slots, we will extend an invitation to the most promising. 

During the training, we will identify the organizations with projects suitable for a randomized evaluation and introduce them to researchers in the J-PAL network. Afterward, the researchers and organizations can apply jointly for evaluation funds.

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