Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from the Gambia

We evaluate two experiments of early childhood development (ECD) programs in the Gambia, one increasing access to services and another improving service quality. In the first experiment, new community-based ECD centers were introduced into randomly chosen villages that had no preexisting structured ECD services. In the second experiment, a randomly assigned subset of existing ECD centers received intensive provider training. We find no evidence that either intervention improved average levels of child development. Exploratory analysis suggests that the first experiment, which increased access to community-based ECD services, led to declines in child development among children from less disadvantaged households.