Dr Sonya Krutikova

Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor.

Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate two approaches to improving the quality of Colombian preschools.

This study is among the first to rigorously demonstrate potential of life skills interventions to change key outcomes of adolescent girls living in contexts where girls and women continue to be caught in a vicious cycle of low levels of human capital, low labour force participation rate, low wages, low bargaining power within the household, early marriage and high fertility.

We study the relationship between child work and cognitive development in four Low and Middle Income Countries.

High quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) are critical to children’s development and their success in adult life. Ghana has shown substantial commitment to improving ECCE, with one of the highest pre-school enrolment rates in Sub Saharan Africa. However despite this, significant barriers to improvements in ECCE remain, especially in rural areas.

This report presents a detailed overview of the baseline data collection activities as part of the project "Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''. The project is collaboration between The Institute for Fiscal Studies (UK), Lively Minds (UK, Ghana) and Innovations for Poverty Action (Ghana), and is funded by the Jacobs Foundation and Global Innovation Fund (GIF).

This is a pre-analysis plan specifies analysis we plan to perform for the evaluation of PANKH: an intervention in Dhaulpur district, Rajasthan targeting marriage, education, mental health and socio-emotional skills of adolescent girls as well as gender attitudes of girls and their carers.

This paper investigates whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school, using data from Vietnam and Peru. Two different results emerge: in Vietnam, there is no evidence that schools are less effective for disadvantaged groups, while in Peru disadvantaged groups do learn less.

This briefing note, released as part of the IFS's pre-election analysis, provides key information on UK aid spending.

This article identifies some of the gaps in the existing literature pertaining to childhood development. It then introduces the Young Lives dataset, explaining the importance of such comparable data from longitudinal studies in different countries for this field of research, before exploring the contributions of each of the articles using this data in this journal's special edition.

Adolescents make up a larger proportion of the population in lower- and middle-income countries than ever before. Given that adolescence is critical in determining later life opportunities and outcomes, this youth bulge brings both unprecedented risks and opportunities. This report presents baseline data for a large study assessing the effect of an integrated community-based programme, PAnKH, that aims to delay age at marriage, increase school retention and improve sexual reproductive health (SRH) of adolescent girls in India.

We examine the impact of a long-term programme designed to raise non-cognitive skills of children and adolescents in slums in Bombay. We use a cross-cutting design with two comparison groups of peers for young adults who have attended the programme until leaving high school to analyse whether, compared to those from a similar environment and background, enrolment in the programme demonstrably raises such skills. We find evidence of substantial impacts on both self-esteem and self-efficacy (of about one standard deviation), as well as evidence of a smaller impact on life evaluation and aspirations.

This paper extends analyses of association between maternal mental health and infant growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to children through age eight years, and broaden analyses to cognitive and psychosocial outcomes.

This paper examines – for two developing countries, Vietnam and Peru – whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school. The paper examines six different definitions of advantage, based on household wealth, cognitive skills at age 5, gender, ethnicity (Peru only), maternal education, and nutritional status.