The Medium-term Effects of Home-based Early Childhood Development Intervention Impact Evaluation 2011, Midline Survey

Six professionals were chosen among a number of applicants on the basis of their CV and an interview. They were trained in child development, home visiting and the curriculum for over one and a half months. The training also included practicing home visits in Soacha. These professionals, who will be referred to as “mentors” in what follows, then had the task to train the home visitors in the field – i.e. teach them the curriculum and the approach to home visiting – and mentor/supervise them throughout the intervention. To this end, each of them was assigned 8 towns, for a total of 24 home visitors each.

The training of the home visitors was split across two workshops. The first, lasting two weeks, covered the first part of the stimulation curriculum (activities for children ages 12 to 30 months) along with the fundaments of child development, the importance of adequate care and stimulation, and toy construction workshops. Once this first round of training was completed, the home visitors were deemed ready to start the visits. This process took place at the same time as data collection (being careful in each village to ensure data collection had taken place before the intervention started), from February through June 2010, so by the end of June 2010 the intervention was fully phased-in across all treatment villages. The second phase of the training workshops took place between mid August and mid October 2010 over a one week period. In these sessions, the home visitor and the mentor covered the second half of the curriculum (activities for children aged 30 to 42 months), revised lessons covered in the first workshop, resolved doubts, and discussed any outstanding issues.

After that, the six mentors became, for the rest of the intervention, mentors and supervisors of the home visitors. They traveled around each of their 8 towns, spending up to a week in each, overseeing visits of their assigned home visitors and providing them with advice, training, feed-back, and support. This rotation scheme is such that each home visitor received about a week of interaction with her mentor once every 4-6 weeks. Furthermore, mentors and home visitors are in touch on a regular basis: the home visitors receive weekly to fortnightly telephone calls to discuss progress and problems; they receive weekly text messages to reinforce key messages to be conveyed during home visits, and they receive monthly one-page bulletins that reinforce material covered during training sessions. Overall, the mentors have played a very important role in the intervention.