Impact of Social Assistance on Early Childhood Development among Ultra-Poor Households

The project will in particular use and build on an earlier randomised control trial intervention (part of CERP’s Asset Transfer project) targeted at the poorest households in rural Punjab, Pakistan. In 2014, households were randomly assigned to either receive asset transfers (typically in the form of livestock) or the equivalent unconditional cash transfer. In the subsequent eight years, both forms of social assistance are documented to have substantial impacts on the labour market activities, earnings and investments of treated households.

This project will investigate how each form of social assistance impacted children’s outcomes, for those born prior, during or just after the original intervention. A range of child outcomes will be studied, and measures of cognitive and non-cognitive development for children between the ages of 0-8 years. We will also collect information to identify the mechanisms generating child development outcomes, such as parental beliefs and attitudes. This data will be collected from a sample of ultra-poor households residing in the four Project Districts: Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar, Muzaffargarh and Lodhran.

Three different child development tools (the IDEALA tool for children aged 48 months – 7 years 11 months 30 days, Liz Spelke’s tasks for children aged 36 months – 7 years 11 months 30 days and a brief child development assessment for children aged 6-35 months 30 days) will be used along with a section on mother or primary caregiver’s physical and mental health to measure outcomes at different stages of child development.

The IDELA is an internationally validated tool which has already been used by multiple research teams in Pakistan (https://idela-network.org/about/). All tests are direct assessments except the CREDI which exclusively relies on mother or primary caregiver reports, and thus, primarily focuses on milestones and behaviours that are easy for mothers or primary caregivers to understand, observe, and describe. Interviewers will conduct the surveys with children in the respondents’ homes and the mothers/caregivers will be present at all times during the interview.