The Impact of a Community Development and Poverty Reduction Program on Early Childhood Development in Morocco

Participatory community development
programs are designed to match government investments with
local needs. In Morocco, where issues of inequality and
poverty are high on the national agenda, a community
development program, the National Initiative for Human
Development, targeted high-poverty areas for additional
investments. This paper examines whether, in addition to
reducing poverty, such programs can also promote human
development, specifically early childhood development. Early
childhood development forms a critical foundation for later
human development and plays a key role in the
intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.
Using panel data on communities just above and below the
cutoff for National Initiative for Human Development
inclusion in rural areas, regression discontinuity and fixed
effect models are applied to identify the impact of the
program on economic outcomes and early childhood
development. Although the analysis finds some transitory
impacts of the program on economic outcomes, it finds no
impacts on early childhood development. Reducing inequality
and promoting human development through early childhood
development is likely to require specific, targeted, and
sustained initiatives.