A key aim of this research is to identify cost-effective and sustainable interventions to promote early childhood development. We will implement two interventions in rural Colombia in a cost effective way, by exploiting the structure and networks built up by the conditional cash transfer programme, Familias en Acción. This offers a model for scaling up of the interventions, if successful. The first intervention involves women from the community making weekly home visits to mothers of children aged 6-18 months, for 2 years. The second intervention involves providing information and advice to mothers on child cognitive development. We will also provide nutrition supplements for some children. We will use a randomised trial framework to measure the impacts. The main outcomes we will consider are the cognitive development and health of the children that are the target of the study. We will also consider outcomes relating to the mothers, such as depression. We will also investigate why a particular intervention works or not, so as to understand the constraints that poor households face when making choices relevant to their children's development. This will be done by exploiting the exogenous variation induced by the intervention and the rich data we will collect.

Household-based interviews; child assessments