Scaling up book sharing (EMERGE, Kenya)

One reason children living in poverty do not achieve their potential in terms of language development and emergent literacy is that they do not have access to linguistically stimulating home environments. The availability of storybooks in the home and the quantity and quality of parents’ reading engagements with their children are consistently associated with children’s cognitive and language development, school readiness, and achievement. In particular, exposure to storybooks has a direct, positive, causal impact on children’s vocabulary and language skills. In spite of the importance of books and parental engagement, 97% of households in Sub-Saharan Africa have two or fewer children’s books, and only half of parents report having engaged in any cognitively stimulating activities with their young children in the last three days, according to UNICEF data from the MICS survey.

Findings:

In Kenya, we used a randomized controlled design to test several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents and improve emergent literacy skills in children and found that parent training paired with the provision of culturally appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions. Our process of developing measures of early childhood development were published in Developmental Science and the effects of our pilot trial were published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.  We are now in the process of scaling up this intervention even more broadly to see if the effects are sustained.  The final outcome paper has been accepted for publication based on Stage 1 Pre-Results Review at the Journal of Development Economics.

Collaborators:

Owen Ozier, Pamela Jakiela, Heather Knauer. 

Publications (sorted by recency): 

Knauer, H., Jakiela, P., Ozier, O., Aboud, F. and Fernald L.C.H.  Enhancing young children’s language acquisition through dialogic reading and local-language storybooks: a randomized trial in rural Kenya.  Early Childhood Research Quarterly (2019) Apr 30.

 Knauer, H., Jakiela, P., Ozier, O., Kariger, P. and Fernald L.C.H.   Multilingual Assessment of Early Childhood Development in Low- and Middle- Income Countries: Prediction and Measurement of School Readiness in Multilingual a Context. Developmental Science (2019)

Funders:

The World Bank, and the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund