Extending and Enhancing the Ongoing Early Childhood Development (ECD) Scale-up Programme (Saving Bangladeshi Babies Brain (SB3) in Bangladesh

Background (brief):

1. Burden: Globally 250 million children under 5 years of age in developing countries do not reach their full potential due to poverty, malnutrition, and lack of a stimulating environment.
2. Knowledge gap: The early childhood intervention curriculum 'Reach up & Learn' has been adapted for Bangladesh and were successfully used in 10 trials including two trials integrated with Primary Health Care (PHC) services implemented in Community Clinics. Based on the success of the last two studies, the current programme 'Saving Bangladeshi Babies Brains (SB3)' is conducted in 4 districts. Under this programme, a small cluster randomised controlled trial (cRCT) was conducted and found no benefit on child development. However, the programme involved implementation challanges. Therefore, there is a need to determine the strategies to mitigate the challenges and conduct another round of cRCT to test the effectiveness of the strategies on the child development outcomes.
3. Relevance: Bangladesh Govt acknowledges the need for improving children's development and has agreed to collaborate and implement early childhood development (ECD) activities at large scale.

Hypothesis (if any): The Investigators hypothesize that the identified strategies would be effective in improving children's development.

Objectives:

1. To identify the potential strategies to promote the quality and fidelity of the SB3 early childhood parenting programme integrated into government health care services.
2. To measure the effectivity of the intervnetion on the cogntion, langauge, motor development, and beahvior of the children and maternal parenting knowledge and quality of stimulation at home.

Methods: A mixed-method data collection has been conducted and three potential strategies were identified: raising community awareness, increasing health worker's motivation to deliver a quality programme, and the revised curriculum by replacing mothers' made toys to the supplied toys from the progarmme. These startegies will be piloted. And based on the pilot findings, two strategies will be selected to test the effectiveness on child development using a cluster randomised controlled trial design. In the cluster RCT, there will be two arms : i) intervnetion arm I: regular curriclum, ii) intervnetion arm II: revised curriculum and iii) Unique control. Twenty unions from each programme running district will be randomly selected and then randomly allocated to intervention arm I & II . A four non-programme running districts located at the border of the programme districts will be selected as unique control. The children will be tested at the beginning and the end of the 6 months of intervention.

Outcome measures/variables: The primary outcomes are children's cognition, and language development and the secondary outcomes are children's behaviour and growth, maternal knowledge on child care and their practices, home stimulation and maternal depressive symptoms.