?A Thousand Days?: An Early Childhood Protection Program in Argentina

GONZALEZ, MARIA SOL; SANTOS, MARÍA EMMA

Conferencia; Virtual International Conference of the Western Economic Association; 2021

Western Economic Association

A Thousand Days is an early childhood protection program over the first thousand days of life,since gestation and until two years of age. The program is targeted to highly vulnerablefamilies, and has been implemented since August 2015 in San Miguel, a municipality of theGreat Buenos Aires area in Argentina. A Thousand Days is designed in a comprehensive andintersectoral way, intending to address simultaneously the various deprivations exhibited bythe family in health, nutrition, housing and family relationships. The main form of interventionis through home visits and health check-ups, but other benefits are activated depending ondiagnosis, including food assistance, provision of housing materials, preferential access toChild-Family Development Centres and processing access to conditional cash transfer (CCT)benefits. The intervention is intended to last for a year, but this varies. Exits of the programoccur when the mother and child have reversed the deprivation/s of the entrance-criteria.This paper provides the first analysis of the program?s primary data between August 2015 andMay 2019, with a total of 1111 program participants. First, we perform a statistical analysis ofthe targeted population of the program. Second, using regression analysis we study factorsassociated to the withdrawal from program. We find that the higher the number of vulnerabilitycriteria at entrance, the higher the chances to dropout from the program. We also find thatdomestic violence and extreme social vulnerability such as being undocumented, adolescentmothers, undernourished children, families living in dwellings of deprived materials andmothers with psychiatric problems, legal conflicts or drugs consumption, are associated tohigher risk of dropout. In contrast, being beneficiary of the main CCT program in the countryreduces the dropout risk. Third, using survival analysis, we study the mother and child?s socioeconomiccharacteristics and entrance criteria associated to longer program treatment. Wefind that program participants with a higher number of vulnerability criteria require more timeto graduate from it. Also, pregnant mothers without controls, or with high-risk pregnancies, orwith psychiatric problems, neurological problems, diabetes or heart disease, take more time toexit the program. Mothers and children with critical housing deficits and extreme vulnerabilityalso take longer to graduate, as well as children protected with a safeguard order and/orwithout pediatric controls.