Growing Futures

J-PAL LAC Video | Improving Lives in LAC: The Construyendo Futuros Initiative (Guatemala)

Our approach

Growing Futures brings together evidence generation, capacity building, and strategic partnerships. We do this through four mutually reinforcing pillars:

Promote innovation and strengthen capacities. Incubate high-potential ideas and support local government and practitioners through targeted technical assistance and training.
 

Evaluate and scale effective solutions. Run competitive calls and support impact evaluations to identify what works and inform scale-up efforts.

Strengthen partnerships and data systems. Work with government, civil society, and academia to improve data quality and availability, support better decision-making, and institutionalize evidence use.

Disseminate and adapt evidence. Synthesize findings and support the adaptation of research insights to new contexts so practitioners and policymakers can act on evidence.


Together, these pillars are intended to generate more locally grounded evidence, strengthen technical capabilities, and improve the design and implementation of social programs. Over time, Growing Futures aims to contribute to better developmental trajectories for children, greater economic well-being for families, and reduced intergenerational poverty in Guatemala.

Guatemala: Fertile soil for evidence-based policymaking

An urgent challenge, and a clear opportunity to act. Although Guatemala is a middle-income country, many children and families still face overlapping deprivations in nutrition, health, early stimulation, and access to quality services, with wide territorial and socioeconomic disparities. Strengthening the links between early childhood development, social protection, health, education, and livelihoods creates an important opportunity to improve how social programs respond to these challenges.

A foundation already in place. From 2023 to 2025, we implemented PROSA in partnership with UVG, establishing the foundations for our work in Guatemala and strengthening a culture of evidence use around early childhood development. PROSA strengthened local capacity, developed a research agenda, and created working relationships with government and civil society. Through this work, we trained more than 400 public officials and over twenty organizations, and supported the launch of new research projects on priority early childhood questions.

Strong partner demand and readiness to act. Guatemala is now part of J-PAL LAC’s Evidence to Policy Partnerships. In a short period, we have built sustained collaborations with the Secretary of Food Security and Nutrition (SESAN), the Ministry of Social Development (MIDES), and the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC). These partnerships respond to a strong demand for data, evidence, and technical support to improve social programs.

A contribution with regional relevance. Central America has been under-represented in rigorous, policy-relevant evaluation and evidence-to-policy work. A stronger presence in Guatemala creates an opportunity to generate locally grounded evidence and implementation lessons that can inform decisions across the region.

In short, Guatemala combines urgent policy challenges, strong partner demand, and clear opportunities to generate and use evidence to improve programs for children and families.

PROSA: Building the foundation for Growing Futures

PROSA, short for Screening and Launching Program, was the first phase of J-PAL LAC and UVG’s work in Guatemala. From 2023 to 2025, it helped build a culture of evidence use around early childhood development by strengthening local capacities, launching new research, and building partnerships with government and civil society. What began as PROSA has since evolved into Growing Futures, a broader platform that brings together strategic partnerships, capacity building, and applied research to address priority policy questions in Guatemala.

Explore the origins of Growing Futures in PROSA

Our current work: Growing Futures

Building on PROSA, Growing Futures keeps early childhood development at the center of its work while adopting a broader, multidimensional approach to social policy in Guatemala. It supports better program design, incubates and pilots innovations, and, when appropriate, tests promising approaches so that evidence can inform adaptation and scale-up. This work also seeks to strengthen Guatemala’s broader evidence ecosystem and generate lessons with potential relevance across Central America.

Research questions in our agenda

• Education. Our research agenda seeks to generate evidence on how educational interventions can improve children's learning, socio-emotional development, and educational trajectories across different stages of childhood. We examine interventions that support children directly, strengthen parenting and the home learning environment, and improve school systems, with particular attention to the mechanisms through which they operate, the conditions under which they are most effective, and the factors that determine their scalability and long-term impact. 
• Nutrition and health. We aim to learn which bundles of actions most effectively improve child nutrition in Guatemala’s diverse contexts, and which delivery channels sustain adoption of nutrient-rich diets over time. A core line of inquiry examines whether integrated approaches that combine nutrition with parenting support, preventive health care, or water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions generate larger and more sustained improvements in children’s anthropometric, cognitive, and socio-emotional outcomes. We also want to understand how these approaches can be brought to scale while maintaining quality and cost-effectiveness.
• Social protection. We seek to understand how social protection systems can better support early childhood development by improving the design, targeting, and delivery of programs for vulnerable families. Our research examines how cash transfers, home-visiting programs, and other social services influence children's health, nutrition, learning, and development, with particular attention to the mechanisms through which they operate and the barriers that limit access and take-up. We also study how program design and implementation affect effectiveness, equity, and scalability, with the goal of informing social protection systems that reach the families who need them most.
• Livelihoods. We seek to understand how household livelihoods and community environments shape early childhood development and long-term human capital accumulation. Our research examines how improvements in income stability, employment, housing, infrastructure, environmental health, and access to public services influence children's nutrition, health, learning, and well-being, as well as the mechanisms through which these effects occur. We also study how multidimensional livelihood programs and interventions supporting vulnerable populations, including return migrant families, can strengthen household resilience and improve child development outcomes, with a focus on designing scalable and effective policies.

Policy projects and technical assistance

Growing Futures is already supporting a set of projects with government and partner organizations. Together, these efforts translate Growing Futures research agenda into concrete opportunities for program improvement, piloting, and future evaluation. 

Related events

Host university

UVG Guatemala

Program implementers

Ministry of Social Development, Guatemala	Mano a mano	Secretaría de Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional, Guatemala	Ministry of Education, Guatemala

Donors

Growing Futures is supported by Amigos de J-PAL en Guatemala, Grupo IDC, and FID.
 

Project team

Co-Chairs

• Karen Macours, Co-Chair, Growing Futures; J-PAL Affiliated Professor; Professor, Paris School of Economics
• Mauricio Romero, Co-Chair, Growing Futures; J-PAL Affiliated Professor; Associate Professor of Economics, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)

Staff

• Claudia Macías, Deputy Executive Director, J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean
• Constanza Alarcón Cordón, Policy Manager for Early Childhood, J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean
• Sandra Sandoval, Senior Policy Associate, J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean
• Mónica García Salas, Policy Associate, J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean

Funded research projects

For Researchers

Request for proposals (RFP)

Growing Futures includes a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) to support policy-relevant research aligned with priority questions in education, nutrition and health, social protection, and livelihoods in Guatemala. Through this mechanism, J-PAL LAC and UVG support selected projects with strong potential to generate policy-relevant learning, inform adaptation, and contribute to future scale-up efforts. 

Details on the research agenda, eligibility, timeline, and application process are available on the RFP page. 
 

RFP details available here.