Research Report No. 144The Hogares Comunitarios Program was launched as a pilot project in Guatemala City in 1991 in response to the need for alternative childcare in a rapidly urbanizing environment. By providing working parents with lowcost, quality childcare within their communities, the program seeks to improve young children's diets, nutrition, and development, while enabling poor parents to engage in income-generating activities. Similar programs have been used throughout Latin America, but few have been carefully assessed. This report evaluates the program's implementation, its service delivery and quality, and its impact on beneficiary children and their families.
Marie T. Ruel was appointed division director of IFPRI's Food Consumption and Nutrition Division in 2004, having previously held the roles of research fellow and senior research fellow in that division. Since joining IFPRI in 1996, Ruel has led IFPRI's multicountry program on Challenges to Urban Food and Nutrition Security, and the global and regional program on Diet Quality and Diet Changes of the Poor. Prior to joining IFPRI, she was head of the Nutrition and Health Division at the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama/Pan American Health Organization (INCAP/PAHO) in Guatemala.
Agnes R. Quisumbing is a senior research fellow in IFPRI's Food Consumption and Nutrition Division. Her research interests include poverty, gender, property rights, and economic mobility. From 1995 to 2002, Quisumbing led IFPRI's multicountry program on Gender and Intrahousehold Resource Allocation. This research was a collaborative study with IFPRI's multicountry program on Challenges to Urban Food and Nutrition Security. She is currently co-leader of the global and regional program on Pathways from Poverty and is involved in longitudinal studies in Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the Philippines.
Kelly Hallman is a research associate at the Population Council in New York. She conducts research on factors that promote safe and productive transitions to adulthood in developing countries, and on how policies and programs can enhance the decisionmaking power of young people—especially girls—with regard to their sexual and reproductive health, education,work, and marriage choices. She is currently focusing on these issues in South Africa and Guatemala. Before joining the Population Council in 2001, Hallman was a postdoctoral fellow and then research fellow at IFPRI, where she studied how gender and intrahousehold power dynamics affect food and nutrition security in poor countries.
Bénédicte de la Brière is a social protection specialist in the World Bank's Human Development Department for Latin America and the Caribbean. She joined the World Bank after working in Brazil for the United Kingdom's Department for International Development. Between 1996 and 1999 she was a postdoctoral fellow in IFPRI's Food Consumption and Nutrition Division, researching intrahousehold impacts of programs in Bangladesh, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Nora Coj de Salazar was the main field supervisor during the evaluation. After that she joined the Hogares Comunitarios Program, where she works as a psychologist.
The abstract and report are available for download in PDF format as an entire document or by chapter.
- Full Report
- Abstract
- Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures, Foreword, Acknowledgments, and Summary
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Women and Urban Poverty in Guatemala
- Chapter 3: Objectives, Design, and Cost of the Hogares Comunitarios Program
- Chapter 4: Overview of Study Objectives, Design, Methods, and Samples
- Chapter 5: Operational Evaluation of the Hogares Comunitarios Program: Conceptual Framework, Objectives, and Methodology
- Chapter 6: How Well Does the Hogares Comunitarios Program Work? Key Findings of the Operational Evaluation and Follow-Up Actions
- Chapter 7: Impact Evaluation of the Hogares Comunitarios Program: Objectives, Design, and Methodology
- Chapter 8: Key Findings of the Evaluation of the Program's Coverage, Cost, and Impact on Children's Diets
- Chapter 9: Conclusions and Implications for Urban Programming
- Appendix A: Appendix: List of Modules and Data Collected for Beneficiary/Control and Random Samples
- References
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