As part of Charity Entrepreneurship's 2023 Top Ideas contest, will we select "An organization focuses on early childhood stimulation" as a top Mass Media intervention?
Idea overview
By the age of four, it is estimated that over 40% of children in sub-Saharan Africa fail to meet the cognitive or socio-emotional milestones expected for their age. Many are likely to do poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes as adults. Intervening in the first three years of life is a highly effective way to help children develop their cognitive skills. This organization would focus either on encouraging and supporting parents to spend more time doing stimulating activities with their children, or produce stimulating (audio or audiovisual) content that children could engage with.
Mass media interventions
By ‘mass media’ intervention we refer to social and behavior change communication campaigns delivered through mass media, aiming to improve human well-being. We intend to select 2-4 ideas out of the 10 presented to recommend to entrepreneurs who enter our incubation program. This market resolves YES if this idea is chosen; NO otherwise.
About the contest
In partnership with Charity Entrepreneurship, Manifold is sponsoring a $2000 forecasting tournament to inform which ideas end up selected
You can win part of a $1000 prize pool as a forecaster, for best predicting which interventions we choose.
You can win one of ten $100 prizes for posting an informative comment on Manifold that most influences our decision.
For contest details and all markets, see the group CE 2023 Top Ideas.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ110 | |
| 2 | Ṁ54 | |
| 3 | Ṁ51 | |
| 4 | Ṁ50 | |
| 5 | Ṁ50 |
@Lorenzo It doesn’t look any different than the second idea in the most recent blog post. This idea.
@BTE "This organization would focus either on encouraging and supporting parents to spend more time doing stimulating activities with their children, or produce stimulating (audio or audiovisual) content that children could engage with."
While iiuc the blog post mentions "improve the quality of teaching by providing structured teacher guides alongside training and coaching on their usage."
I don't think this intervention is particularly strong, but as an average intervention, I think it belongs somewhere near 30% range, so the market is undervalued. This intervention seems promising, as this type of programming could be highly beneficial if done correctly, though I am concerned about the measurement of impact of this intervention because the organization will necessarily deal with longer timescales in its work.
I suspect there is a large opportunity cost of parents spending more time with their children for people in deep poverty. I sort of struggle to believe that the major issue in impoverished areas is parents not knowing it’s valuable to spend time with their children, as opposed to have life circumstances that force them to work or be elsewhere.
Lack of stimulating play also might have more to do with lack of toys and books than no radio programs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7480591/
It’s possible media instructing how to make time and play more development oriented for the child could have an impact? I found a study in Burkina Faso: https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/2/e001233
But for this to be convincing to me I think I would need long term followups and randomization. It’s not clear how much impact marginal changes in childhood activities would have on life outcomes, and I do have a prior that communities might have a better understanding of the child’s needs.
I'm not sure about creating audio-visual content, but it seems there are promising ideas in the vicinity, for instance advising parents from developing countries to utilize evidence-based strategies in running children groups .
Positive parenting interventions seem to show significant effects for language (g = .25), and mental abilities (g = .46). Unfortunately, the effect of early childhood interventions seems to fade over time.
There's a surprising lack of RCTs measuring effect of screens in early childhood considering the content. My guess is that a lot of psychologists echo that screens have devastating effects just based on correlational studies and that research in this area could reveal there could be value in rating content based on how positive it seems to be for development. While screen time as such seems to have mildly negative effects, e-book interventions have an effect of g = .85 on language development, compared to regular childcare.
However, I'm not sure whether language skills and educational attainment in studies above measure anything relevant. It could be that a child knows more words and therefore does better in English classes but that this does not have much social value (as Caplan suggests, most value for individuals in language education could be in better education signaling)
I actually took a class that touched on this and found that, specifically with regards to language, children do fine even when cultural practices are set up in ways that go against what the West considers stimulating children. More or less, for language, having a sing-songy, high-pitched voice and talking directly to children are often considered part of how children learn, but some cultural groups don’t do that and their children do fine. Encouraging parents seems odd because presumably parents want to play with their children in stimulating ways?
I think this:
As part of Charity Entrepreneurship's 2023 Top Ideas contest, will we select "Mobile technologies to encourage women to attend antenatal clinics and/or give birth at a health care facility" as a top Mass Media intervention?
needs to be replaced with this:
As part of Charity Entrepreneurship's 2023 Top Ideas contest, will we select "An organization focuses on early childhood stimulation" as a top Mass Media intervention?
There's no way stimulation is the culprit for 40% of children not meeting developmental milestones, right? I'd be extremely surprised if this were
1. not due to something like malnutrition or early childhood illness, and
2. easily solvable by parents interacting with their children in a different way before age three,
3. in a way that doesn't trade off against other things that might contribute to the family's well-being more, and
4. in a way that's easily teachable via a mass-media (i.e., one-way, rather than in-person teaching) campaign.
There's so much variation in how parents in different rich countries treat their toddlers that if difference in stimulation were a huge factor in development, we'd see bigger disparities in those places too. Plus, intuitively, it's hard not to stimulate a toddler? They're interested in everything!
@PatMyron right, presumably whatever time parents aren't spending stimulating their children trades off against some other thing they've judged more valuable (eg, working to feed the children)?
GPT-4 ranked this #3 of the 10
@AnishaZaveri incorrectly copy-pasted for this market too:
https://manifold.markets/CE/7-encouraging-higher-vaccination-ra