The Govt. of Meghalaya is rolling-out age appropriate ECD packages for the mother-child dyad in whole state over a span of 5 years (2024-2028) through Early Childhood Development Mission (MECDM) constituted in partnership with the health, women and child health (WCD), social welfare, and rural livelihood development departments. The age appropriate ECD package is developed based on nurturing care framework and includes age-appropriate early stimulation and responsiveness, nutrition, health and child safety; to be delivered via home, AWCs or community outreach; using existing FLWs and additional human resource i.e. ECD educator to support AWWs in providing centre-based ECD to 1.5-3year-old children. The aim of MECDM is to deliver the ECD package to impact early child development (0-6 years) by improving institutional readiness through AWC upgradation, improving human resource capacity, providing supplementary nutrition, introducing group-based parenting programs, and improving access and quality of childcare; with secondary objective to improve gender equity by re-positioning AWCs as daycare centres to alleviate women’s time poverty and to encourage participation of fathers.

Population Council Institute (PCI), an independent monitoring and evaluation partner, is solely responsible to evaluate the ECD program with technical support from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school of Public Health (no financial bearing on PCI or the Meghalaya state). The evaluation team has no role in program design and implementation.

The evaluation aims to understand to what extent the ECD outcomes can be improved and how much the program improvements contribute to that outcome improvement. The evaluation is composed of an impact evaluation component to assess program effectiveness, and a process evaluation to review the implementation fidelity and strength, sustainability and scalability. The findings will help in explaining the change pathways in the theory of change proposed by the program. The learnings could be scaled or used by the other state governments. in India.

The impact evaluation will adopt stepped wedge design (3 steps) with random allocation of ECD package at block level and measurement of child and women caregiver level outcomes. The team will conduct the surveys in a total of 4 time points- Baseline and then 3 rounds of surveys for each step. Children of 0-1.5 years, 1.5- 3 years, and 3-6 years who are eligible to receive the age-specific ECD package interventions, and their mothers/caregivers will be the study participant including Anganwadi workers, and program implementers. For the outcomes assessment, structured and semi-structured survey schedules are developed along with the inclusion of some standard neurodevelopmental assessment tools (CREDI, IDELA, BSID-IV).”

The process evaluation includes periodic observations at AWCs, attending program review meetings at state, district and block; and periodic qualitative surveys with stakeholders to understand the processes, barriers and facilitators. Observation checklists, interview and FGD guides are developed to facilitate the interviews and discussions.

The study will be conducted as per ICMRs Guidelines for GCLP. Data will be suitably and confidentially managed and analysed as per the analysis plan. Results will be disseminated in consultation with Meghalaya Government.