Nepal : Can Information and Cash Improve Children's Development
In Nepal, researchers supported by the World Bank's Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund worked with the government to develop a program to inform pregnant women and mothers of young children on how to best care for themselves and their children,...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/578991501084554806/Nepal-Can-information-and-cash-improve-childrens-development http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28228 |
| Summary: | In Nepal, researchers supported by the
World Bank's Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund worked
with the government to develop a program to inform pregnant
women and mothers of young children on how to best care for
themselves and their children, using already ongoing
community meetings to deliver messages. An impact evaluation
was designed to measure the effectiveness of the information
and to test whether combining this with a short-term cash
transfer for mothers made it more effective. The evaluation
found that mothers who received both information and cash
reported a higher likelihood of breastfeeding their babies
and reported that they took recommended vitamins and their
households consumed more calories. Also, their children had
better fine and gross motor skills as compared to the
control group, which didn't receive this intervention.
But there weren't any reductions in malnutrition. Two
years later, after a devastating earthquake in 2015,
researchers returned and found that while mothers still
retained more knowledge on good nutrition practices, their
children didn't show any continued development gains.
The results are helping the Government of Nepal as it
considers new steps for improving child development, and the
materials used during the meetings to inform women about
healthy nutrition have been adopted for wider use. |
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