Adapting M&E to Address COVID-19 Challenges Leads to Expansion of Early Childhood Program in Brazil

27 June 2022
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Adapting M&E to Address COVID-19 Challenges Leads to Expansion of Early Childhood Program in Brazil
Working in partnership with the Rio Grande do Sul State Government and local stakeholders, the CLEAR-LAB team supported policymakers in upgrading the Primeira Infância Melhor Program (PIM) in response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contributing Authors:

André Portela, Director; Professor of Economics, FGV EESP
Lycia Lima, Deputy Director, CLEAR-LAB; Professor of Economics, FGV EESP
Gabriel Weber, Researcher, CLEAR-LAB
Giovanna Chaves, Researcher Assistant, CLEAR-LAB
Juliana Camargo, Researcher, CLEAR-LAB; Assistant Professor, FGV RI

Editing support was provided by Maria Fyodorova, Communications Consultant for GEI.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly affected early childhood development. Parents have faced unemployment, schools and daycare centers have closed, and there has been an increase in domestic violence. Even two years into the pandemic, governments worldwide are still facing significant challenges to prioritize interventions and update their policies – trying to identify the best ways to provide assistance to millions of children and their families in response to the impacts of COVID-19. In these unprecedented times, effectively adapting monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices can be a crucial step in responding to these challenges.

At the start of the pandemic, CLEAR-LAB - one of the six regional CLEAR Centers that are part of the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) - stepped in to help a government partner develop and implement innovative M&E solutions for an early childhood intervention program, which was under threat of being interrupted due to social distancing measures. Working in partnership with the Rio Grande do Sul State Government and local stakeholders, the CLEAR-LAB team supported policymakers in upgrading the Primeira Infância Melhor Program (PIM) in response to the challenges posed by COVID-19.

PIM is an innovative early childhood development support program started in 2003. The program promotes child development fundamentals, supports positive parenting approaches, helps identify family needs, and connects families with a robust network of public services. It assists over 53,000 vulnerable families in 235 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil’s Southern region, covering more than 60,000 children under the age of six and 8,000 pregnant women.

At the onset of the pandemic, PIM activities, which center around in-person home visits, were abruptly interrupted to comply with social distancing measures. The Rio Grande do Sul government had to act quickly to figure out an alternative approach to connect with target families, as the early childhood program is considered a top priority for the government. With the support of the Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal Foundation (FMCSV), a respected Brazilian social organization focused on early childhood policy improvement, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), CLEAR-LAB and state policymakers worked together with a monitoring and evaluation mindset to adapt PIM into a remote program.

Through systematic analyses of national and international home visit programs that had adopted remote methodologies, CLEAR-LAB was able to suggest best practices to solve the challenges PIM was facing. This included strategies to maintain beneficiary engagement in the absence of in-person visits and approaches to improve monitoring under novel modalities of program delivery. CLEAR-LAB also offered training to PIM workers on M&E approaches and helped design an updated Theory of Change for the program with the help of relevant government stakeholders.

Even though the new remote modality will not completely replace traditional in-person visits post-COVID - the only reliable way of connecting with more vulnerable families in Brazil - due to CLEAR-LAB’s recommendations and assistance around monitoring and evaluation of these new methods, the PIM program has decided that remote delivery methods are a viable approach to increase the number of people the program can support. For instance, by using remote methods, PIM can more easily connect with pregnant women who work full-time and families with children enrolled in early childhood education institutions. The experience of adapting to the pandemic has highlighted that there are opportunities for policymakers and social workers to continue to innovate to make their programs better – especially with the targeted support of partners such as CLEAR-LAB.

 

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Header picture courtesy of Primeira Infância Melhor.