This is the final (endline) report of a three-year evaluation of Save the Children’s Early
Childhood Stimulation (ECS) program, which Save the Children implemented using government
service providers in three upazilas of three different districts in Bangladesh. The ECS program
targeted parents of infants and toddlers and taught them about the importance of positive early
stimulation and maternal responsiveness to support and enhance the development of these young
children. In doing so, the program was integrated into the National Nutrition Services (NNS),
which aimed to increase access to key nutrition services for pregnant and lactating women and
children under the age of five to reduce malnutrition in the community.
There is considerable evidence that early stimulation programs benefit the families and children
they serve (see Bake & Lopez, 2010 for an extensive review). However, because these programs
typically include repeated visits to individual parents they tend to be relatively expensive and
difficult to scale up with fidelity, especially in low and middle-income countries that can devote
only limited government resources to early childhood development. Thus, most of the successful
programs identified by Bake & Lopez and others were not widely adopted or replicated beyond
the settings in which they were originally tested.