By Kimberly Ramkhalawan
March 17, 2023
With many countries still grappling with the inequities further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is holding a seminar on how it could serve to renew social investments for a more effective fight against poverty and inequality.
The session “How to Renew Social Investments for a more Effective Fight against Poverty and Inequality”, formed the first seminar of the Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the IDB and IDB Invest currently ongoing in Panama City, Panama, until March 19, which saw policy makers and academics discuss effective programs to address the gaps in human capital formation as a fundamental pillar to combat long term poverty, reduce income inequality, expand opportunities, and increase social mobility in LAC.
Sue Walker, Professor of Nutrition and former Director of the Caribbean Institute for Health Research, University of West Indies, Jamaica, leading the panel into discussion “Increasing Quality and Efficiency of Human Capital Formation”, focused on early childhood development, and shared that this was the area that needed continuous investments across the LAC, as research shows that ROI were often high in this area, once programmes to enhance quality have been done successfully. However, the challenge faced currently is how to scale this up?
Professor Walker says there is substantial evidence as to what works between the age group zero to three years, and what is given to parents to help support their development, along with how to build the skills of care givers that run parenting groups ,with much of this evidence having been produced in both Latin America and the Caribbean, with IDB playing a pivotal role in both supporting and generating statistics to back this up.
However, she notes there is need to share this evidence across all countries, so that parenting programs developed can be done elsewhere based on what works and what does not. Noting that similar projects were done in Jamaica on small scale, were actually programs first developed on trial basis in Columbia on a moderate scale. Cuna Mas, a program in Peru, which looks to improve the development of girls and boys under 36 months of age, in localities in situations of poverty and extreme poverty, contributing to overcoming the gaps in their cognitive, social, physical and emotional development, is another success story.
Through the pandemic, it redirected the attention to inequities in the loss of learning with schools closed and services for families reduced. Professor Walker says while there has always been a loss in development even prior to the pandemic it remains an issue seen annually where families are recorded to have no access to any early childhood learning, resulting in widening gap in development, which begins in infancy making it challenging for them to catch up at the primary school level, establishing the case for scaling early childhood care programming.
Drawing reference once again to the Cuna Mas National Programme, she says this “was scaled up at a rapid rate of three years to reach 70,000 vulnerable families from rural areas in Peru. With evaluation led by the IDB showing that despite the implementation challenges, the programme had modest benefits but significant benefits for children’s development”.
But the question on how does any country move forward in scaling up? Professor Walker says there is a need for commitment to sustainable development in early childhood programming, as often commitment is limited to the initial stages, but lapses long term, moving toward other priorities, and therefore calls for sustainable budgets for childhood.
Linking early childhood programming to social protection and health systems is another, alongside the use of conditional cash transfer program. Countries that have adopted these strategies include Jamaica and Brazil have opted to link this to their health systems. Professor Walker however laments that while health systems can be effective in identifying and reaching children in need, deploying staff to the program, for successful scaling through the health system program will require additional investment and resources.
To her knowledge, the largest scaling of such an early childhood program in Latin America, is the Criança Feliz (or Happy Child). The flagship program in Brazil started in 2016, but by 2020 was reaching over 500,000 families with home visits, who were beneficiaries of a cash transfer program. This however, within one year of the pandemic, that number has almost tripled to 1.3million.
Evaluation, uncovered that in many of the rural parts, quality was not being achieved. In collaborating with the IDB and the Lego foundation along with the University of Sao Paolo, the government began a process of retooling to improve quality with some of the elements for a more structured guidance from home visitors, including an app in helping them deliver the program, as well as improved training and systems for monitoring and support. From this, she said shared that the Brazil experience offered a lot to learn.
With poverty levels at a 10-year high in Latin America and the Caribbean, should we rethink how we address poverty and inequality and expand opportunities? Our experts will discuss the urgency to improve the quality and efficiency of social investments in health, education, and skills formation to increase social mobility in LAC. They will also debate how social protection systems must change and adapt to be effective in a region with large structural informality, high incidence of natural disasters and climate related events, and a rapid aging process.
In 2021, more than 30 percent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) lived in moderate poverty. Income inequality (as measured by the Gini index) was 0.51. This represents a more than 10-year setback in the region.