Impacts of Integrating Early Childhood with Health Services: Experimental Evidence from the Cresça Com Seu Filho Home Visiting Program

Delivering early childhood programs at scale is a major policy challenge. One way to do so is by using existing public infrastructure. This paper experimentally assesses the short-term impacts of a new government home visiting program integrated into health care services. The program changed the allocation of time for community health workers, asking them to carry out early childhood development-related tasks. We find that access to the program has a positive but modest impact on home environment quality and no impact on child development nor on children's health status. Our results point to the importance of workload, supervision and buy-in from delivery actors to enhance fidelity of interventions.