Effects of Psychosocial Stimulation and Cash on Children's Development and Behaviour

Summary

Burden: In developing countries, an estimated 219 million children do not reach their maximum potentiality because of poverty and associated risk factors. More than half of the Bangladeshi children \<5 years are at risk for developmental delay due to poverty and sub-optimal home stimulation. Sometimes poor people become poorer due to catastrophic expenditure on health care and fall into the vicious cycle of poverty

Knowledge gap: Although, there is evidence that conditional cash transfer helps develop poor people' health and nutritional status, little is known about the effect of unconditional cash transfer and health education (HE) programmes along with psychosocial stimulation on children' cognition and behaviour.

Relevance: The study will bring an opportunity to evaluate the effect of transferring unconditional cash and health education programme along with psychosocial stimulation to poor families under safetynet programme of Bangladesh Govt. in rural areas. The study will also document direct and indirect cost to measure cost effectiveness that will help in decision making to implement the project if it shows benefits to children's development.

Primary Hypothesis (if any):

* Unconditional cash transfer (UCT) and health education (HE) programme will improve child's cognitive, motor and language development and behaviour compared to no intervention group.
* Adding psychosocial stimulation to an unconditional cash transfer (UCT) and health education (HE) programme will will have an additive effect on Childs's cognitive, motor and language development and behaviour compared to the control groups

Secondary Hypothesis:

Additionally the intervention will

* be cost effective,
* reduce mothers' depressive symptoms and improve their self esteem
* improve children's growth and household food security status
* reduce domestic violence
* Health seeking behaviour and health care expenditure

Long-term goal: our ultimate goal is to find a suitable infrastructure to take to scale early child development activities for the whole country.

Methods: It is a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial with three-arms (i) UCT+HE+Psychosocial stimulation (ii) UCT+HE and iii) Comparison group.

Conditions

• Child Development
• Child Behavior

Interventions

OTHER

Psychosocial stimulation (PS)

i) Unconditional Cash Transfer(UCT)/ Maternity Allowance: MoWCA, GoB provides maternity allowance of taka 500 ($6.25) for each mother up to two years in each month. ii) Health Education Awareness Program: All mothers receive health education training by designated LNGOs/CBOs iii) Psychosocial stimulation: The participants will receive fortnightly sessions at home.

OTHER

Government Intervention (UCT+HE)

fgbfgjhgykghilk

Sponsors & Collaborators

• International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Months

Max Age

16 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2017-08-20

Primary Completion

2021-11-30

Completion

2021-11-30

Countries

• Bangladesh

Study Locations