Parents in the classroom: strengthening government capacity to deliver early childhood education

Preschool enrollment has expanded rapidly in low-income countries, but improvements in quality have lagged behind. This paper evaluates a scalable model that engages parents to improve early learning in contexts where both schools and homes are constrained. In collaboration with Ghana’s Ministry of Education, we study the Lively Minds program in rural Ghana that trains mothers from the community to deliver structured, play-based learning activities in public preschools and foster learning and development of their own children at home. Using a cluster randomized controlled trial, we find that the program increases children’s cognitive development by 0.11 standard deviations and reduces problem behaviors, particularly among boys. The reductions in problem behaviors are driven by children of participating mothers, consistent with significant improvements in mothers’ knowledge of child development and increases in developmentally supportive interactions at home. This pattern highlights the importance of engaging parents rather than relying exclusively on classroom-based inputs delivered by teachers or paraprofessionals. Notably, participation in the program has no adverse effects on mothers’ well-being, and we show evidence that implementation quality and mothers’ participation have been sustained as the program scaled to roughly one-third of rural districts nationwide in response to the findings of this evaluation. Overall, the results highlight parents as an effective and underutilized resource in poor rural settings for supporting early skill formation beyond the first 1,000 days and strengthening government capacity to deliver quality early childhood education.