Priority setting in early childhood development: an analytical framework for economic evaluation of interventions

Early childhood development (ECD) sets the foundation for healthy and successful lives with important ramifications for education, labour market outcomes and other domains of well-being. Even though a large number of interventions that promote ECD have been implemented and evaluated globally, there is currently no standardised framework that allows a comparison of the relative cost-effectiveness of these interventions.

We first reviewed the existing literature to document the main approaches that have been used to assess the relative effectiveness of interventions that promote ECD, including early parenting and at-home psychosocial stimulation interventions. We then present an economic evaluation framework that builds on these reviewed approaches and focuses on the immediate impact of interventions on motor, cognitive, language and socioemotional skills. Last, we apply our framework to compute the relative cost-effectiveness of interventions for which recent effectiveness and costing data were published. For this last part, we relied on a recently published review to obtain effect sizes documented in a consistent manner across interventions.

Our framework enables direct value-for-money comparison of interventions across settings. Cost-effectiveness estimates, expressed in $ per units of improvement in ECD outcomes, vary greatly across interventions. Given that estimated costs vary by orders of magnitude across interventions while impacts are relatively similar, cost-effectiveness rankings are dominated by implementation costs and the interventions with higher value for money are generally those with a lower implementation cost (eg, psychosocial interventions involving limited staff).

With increasing attention and investment into ECD programmes, consistent assessments of the relative cost-effectiveness of available interventions are urgently needed. This paper presents a unified analytical framework to address this need and highlights the rather remarkable range in both costs and cost-effectiveness across currently available intervention strategies.