Tools

Initial Screening Tool: selecting families for early childhood development programs

Home visiting programs have the potential to support child development and reduce inequalities. However, failing to identify the most vulnerable families can undermine these efforts. To improve the targeting of such programs, we first identified the strongest predictors of child development that can be measured during pregnancy, based on data from the 2015 Pelotas Birth Cohort: the number of years of maternal and paternal schooling.

With these results in mind, we developed an online tool (https://ecdprograms.shinyapps.io/ECDPrograms/) to help managers prioritize pregnant women based on parental schooling for targeting in home visiting programs that promote early childhood development in Brazil. However, this tool should be part of a broader strategy that includes complementary information and direct interactions with families to jointly decide on inclusion.

The tool has two pages. On the first page (“Pregnant Women Selection”), the user inputs the expected total number of new births in the population for one year and the proportion of those births the program aims to reach. This generates cutoffs for maternal and paternal schooling as suggested by the tool. The second page (“Technical Details”) displays predicted scores of child development vulnerability based on all possible combinations of maternal and paternal years of schooling. For example, we can simulate the situation of aiming to improve focus of the Programa Criança Feliz in Rio de Janeiro by inputting that there are 62811 live births in the city per year (official number registered in 2023) and assuming the program has resources to cover 5% of all pregnant women in the city. Using the maternal-paternal education scores shown in the blue squares of the online tool (Figure below) would then identify 3,091 pregnant mothers where expected child development scores are −0.5 Standard Deviation at age four years.

 

Applied example using the Initial Screening Tool: Selecting families for early childhood development programmes.

The online tool is available at https://ecdprograms.shinyapps.io/ECDPrograms/, where the user will find more instructions and technical details.

 

Publications:

Predictors of early child development for screening pregnant women most in need of support in Brazil. PDF