Caregiver Mental Health and Early Childhood Development in Conflict-Affected Settings: At- Scale Experimental Evidence from Colombia

This project evaluates the scale-up of Semillas de Apego, a community-based psychosocial program designed to restore caregiver mental health and protect early childhood development in conflict-affected and displaced communities. The program targets caregivers of children aged 0–5, a group disproportionately exposed to trauma and adversity. While nurturing care is critical for protecting children’s development, traumatic stress impairs caregivers’ mental health and their capacity to emotionally connect with their children. Semillas de Apego addresses this by promoting caregiver mental health as both an outcome and a pathway for protecting early childhood development in humanitarian contexts.

Developed by Universidad de los Andes and the Child Trauma Research Program at UCSF, the program has undergone three stages of evaluation: a pilot study, a randomized controlled trial in one conflict-affected municipality, and an at-scale pilot in four municipalities. Building on this evidence, we now evaluate the national scale-up, which reaches over 4,200 caregivers annually across 12 municipalities in partnership with local governments and community organizations. Using a phase-in randomized design to ensure an ethical approach, we will assess whether the program’s positive effects and cost-effectiveness documented in the earlier RCT are preserved when implemented at scale and across more heterogeneous populations, including victims of armed conflict, internally displaced persons, and Venezuelan refugees.

Findings will inform the potential and scalability of community-based psychosocial models in humanitarian settings and shed light on the importance of targeting caregiver mental health and early childhood development within a unified lens to prevent the intergenerational transmission of trauma and poverty.