Realizing Capabilities in Ethiopia: Maximizing Early Childhood Investment for Impact and Equity

Enhanced early childhood care development (ECCD) holds great promise for enabling children to realize their full potential and enjoy greater opportunities and rights. In Ethiopia, two types of ECCD centers (government and community supported) were randomly assigned to standard or enhanced quality (emergent literacy and math—ELM) treatments to enable an impact evaluation of early childhood intervention quality on child development outcomes. The children attending these centers are also compared to a group of children without access to ECCD programs. The International Development and Early Learning Assessment administered to the same children twice within seven months’ time reveals that provision of an enhanced early childhood program yields greater impact and equity. Effect sizes in emergent language and literacy, emergent math and social–emotional development domains range from 0.27 to 0.53 for the standard ECCD provision, while enhanced ELM intervention has effect sizes over one standard deviation in each of these three domains. Importantly, children in ELM centers with lowest socioeconomic status made significantly greater gains than their peers with higher socioeconomic status. ECCD quality enhances intervention impact for all children, and closes the gap for the poorest children.