Child Development Study

The fu­ture of a child in a de­vel­op­ing coun­try is shaped by many fac­tors - liv­ing con­di­tions, ill­ness­es, nu­tri­tion, ear­ly stim­u­la­tion, ed­u­ca­tion and vi­o­lence against chil­dren. Ide­al­ly, pro­grams tar­get­ing chil­dren in such con­texts would mon­i­tor all of these fac­tors at high fre­quen­cy, such that the needs of each child may be ad­dressed at the right time. In de­vel­op­ing coun­tries like Malawi, this could not be fur­ther from re­al­i­ty. Data on child and youth de­vel­op­ment is scarce and of­ten avail­able only at large in­ter­vals, forc­ing Gov­ern­ment and in­ter­na­tion­al or­ga­ni­za­tions to “fly blind” in their ef­forts to help such coun­tries to­wards a bet­ter fu­ture.

CCWD supports the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals of this Pro­ject

The Child De­vel­op­ment Study (CDS) com­bines a num­ber of tech­nolo­gies to track in­for­ma­tion about chil­dren and youth de­vel­op­ment. Each of these tech­nolo­gies are tai­lored to de­vel­op­ing coun­try set­tings such as that of Malawi, col­lect­ing week­ly in­for­ma­tion across mul­ti­ple di­men­sions. For in­stance, phone sur­veys are used to track health symp­toms, wear­able sen­sors are em­ployed to track con­tacts and lan­guage in­ter­ac­tions be­tween chil­dren and care­givers, and oth­er wear­able de­vices are used to col­lect non-in­va­sive bio-mark­ers such as brain waves and heart rates, which can help to pre­dict cog­ni­tive and non-cog­ni­tive de­vel­op­ment in re­sponse to cer­tain stim­uli.

Such data has the po­ten­tial to shed light on the de­vel­op­men­tal tra­jec­to­ries of Malaw­ian chil­dren and youth, in­clud­ing the crit­i­cal in­flec­tion points at which var­i­ous in­ter­ven­tions are cru­cial. The data also has the po­ten­tial to sup­port the Malaw­ian pub­lic health sys­tem in swift­ly de­tect­ing the threat of an epi­dem­ic, be it from malar­ia to mal­nu­tri­tion, and trig­ger ear­ly warn­ing sys­tems to mo­bi­lize scarce re­sources where they are need­ed most.

Im­por­tant­ly, the CDS will be car­ried out in vil­lages served by ear­ly child­hood de­vel­op­ment (ECD) cen­ters in the con­text of the School Readi­ness Ini­tia­tive of the Roger Fed­er­er Foun­da­tion. The data streams gen­er­at­ed by CDS, to­geth­er with ran­dom­ized in­ter­ven­tions, will al­low for a deep un­der­stand­ing of the im­pacts of var­i­ous ECD in­ter­ven­tions on chil­dren of dif­fer­ent ages.

Com­bined with rig­or­ous pol­i­cy eval­u­a­tion, this wealth of data will not only in­form the scale-up of suc­cess­ful and re­design of un­suc­cess­ful projects, but ul­ti­mate­ly will al­low for the cus­tomiza­tion of in­ter­ven­tions to the needs of each child and ado­les­cent, not only in Malawi but in oth­er de­vel­op­ing coun­tries af­fect­ed by sim­i­lar chal­lenges and con­straints.

The loop: child and ado­les­cent un­der-de­vel­op­ment, as ex­ist­ing pro­grams strug­gle to de­liv­er the right in­ter­ven­tion at the right time.

Break­ing the loop: high-fre­quen­cy data on child and youth de­vel­op­ment aid­ed by cus­tomized tech­nolo­gies to in­form time­ly re­spons­es, tai­lored to the needs of each child and ado­les­cent.

Re­search Team

Michelle Bosquet Enlow

Harvard University

Ciro Cattuto

ISI Foundation, University of Torino

Annuska Derks

UZH

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Guilherme Lichand

UZH

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John Phuka

Kamuzu University of Health Sciences

Onicio Leal

UZH

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Daniela Paolotti

ISI Foundation

Daniel Robles

University of Alberta

Adriana Weisleder

Northwestern University

Paola Garcia

John Hopkins University

Casey Lew-Williams

Princeton University

Alister Munthali

Center for Social Research Malawi

Alexandra Carstensen

University of Stanford

Asana Okocha

Princeton University

Jessica Kosie

Princeton University

Ad­vi­so­ry Board

Ernst Fehr

UZH

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Susanna Lemann

Roger Federer Foundation, Lemann Foundation

Daniel Frey

UNICEF Foundation Switzerland

James Leckman

Yale Child Study Center