Child-focused Ultra-poor Graduation

We evaluate the impact of promoting non-agricultural entrepreneurship among young mothers on their children’s development and early learning through a novel ultra-poor graduation program (UPG) in Malawi. To our knowledge, this is the first UPG to combine the promotion of business creation with a far-reaching, programmatic focus on child development. Alongside monthly cash transfers, business skills training, and large start-up grants, eligible mothers of children under 5 receive a government-endorsed early childhood development (ECD) course focusing on preventive healthcare, nutrition, parenting, and early learning. The government-endorsed curriculum emphasizes indigenous knowledge and weaves together frontier ECD insights and familiar local stories and songs and supports preschools at the community level. The child development literature highlights the importance of parental time investments in shaping long-term child outcomes (Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach, 2010), yet limited access to flexible work often constrains mothers’ ability to balance the time-money tradeoff. Through the UPG program, we examine how entrepreneurship offers flexibility to generate income while fulfilling their traditional caregiver role, which may mitigate the motherhood penalty (Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard, 2019). We focus on how participating mothers balance business activities with caregiving and assess how these dynamics impact child health and development outcomes. However, challenges remain, as constraints on childcare options and time allocation may undermine business performance and raise concerns about children’s well-being (Delecourt and Fitzpatrick, 2021). With the grant, we seek to fund prolonged tracking of socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical ECD, which are not likely to materialize within one year in an existing RCT.