Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, and Sally Grantham- MacGregor have been conducting and evaluating an integrated early childhood program in central Colombia. The program, which started in 2010, targeted at children between 12 and 24 months old living infamilies receiving the Colombian conditional cash transfer program (Familias en Accion), which targets the poorest 20 percent of households in the country. The intervention lasted 18 months. The program had two components: psychological stimulation and micronutrient supplementation. The psychosocial stimulation program provided weekly home visits to mothers of children with the aim of improving parenting practices in the early years and beyond. The short-term impact evaluation of the home visits showed an increase in cognitive development and receptive language and also showed an improvement in difficult behavior.
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