Gabriela Buccini (Environmental & Occupational Health), Katherine Marcal (Social Work), and Krystyna A. Stave (Public Policy and Leadership) recently received a R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. As part of the award, the collaborators will receive $250,000 per year for a three-year period.
Project abstract summary:
Investments in Integrated Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs are critical for breaking the intergenerational poverty cycle. Recently, Brazil rolled out the Criança Feliz ECD program in response to the 2016 Brazilian National ECD legal framework. This program focuses primarily on fostering nurturing care parenting skills to buffer the negative effects of poverty on children under 3 years and their families enrolled in Bolsa Família, the largest conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in the world. This implementation science project takes a systems approach to achieve two goals: 1) identify pathways of implementation and bottlenecks of Criança Feliz, and 2) help optimize the impact of Bolsa Família on ECD outcomes through the integration of Criança Feliz with the food security components of the program. This project will use a mixed-methods approach grounded within a novel complex adaptive framework previously used for understanding the scaling up of breastfeeding and ECD programs in diverse countries but not in Brazil.
