contributions from the villages to the project. Villages often made available the land on which project playgroups were housed. In contrast, other early childhood programs range in cost from US$37 per child in India to US$52 per child in Mexico to US$66 per child in Brazil—suggesting that this package was slightly less costly (Barnett 1997; Evans, Myers and Ilfeld, 2000).

Teachers who worked in the project playgroups were predominantly women from the village who often had children of their own. Some had prior work experience in health and education. Others had no such prior experience (Hasan, Hyson and Chang, 2013). Taken together, the package of interventions under the Indonesia ECED Project helped finance the demand for and supply of playgroups in a sample of villages that are broadly representative of rural Indonesia (Hasan, Hasan and Chang, 2013, Appendix 9).

# **III. Data**

This paper uses data on project playgroups located in villages that received the block grant and were part of an impact evaluation of the Indonesia ECED Project (N=432).<sup>9</sup> All of these playgroups were surveyed at baseline in 2010. In 2013, one project playgroup per village was sampled for follow up (N=245). The rationale for the selecting these 245 for follow up was that several of the children we had been following for the impact evaluation were enrolled in them.<sup>10</sup> This was the last survey conducted while the project was still active. In 2016, three years after the project had closed, we conducted phone interviews with administrators of all 432 project playgroups to confirm whether they were still open or had closed. If the playgroup was closed, we visited the village and interviewed former center administrators and teachers to collect data on the date of closure, key reasons for closure, as well as what happened to the building, toys, and teachers after the project playgroup closed. If the project playgroups were still open we conducted interviews to collect information on current operations, teachers, and funding modalities.

# **_Main analytic sample_**

However, the main analytic sample in this paper is the 245 project playgroups that were interviewed in 2013 and followed up in 2016. We restrict our analysis to these panel project playgroups primarily because we have detailed data on the characteristics of these project playgroups at _two_ time points - in 2010 and 2013 as well as the knowledge that they were still operating in 2016 - whereas detailed follow up was not completed for the remaining playgroups in 2013. As a result, we have granular data on sustainability for these 245 playgroups - for each, we not only know whether the it was open or closed in 2016 but we also know the number of teachers who received the teacher training offered as part of the Indonesia ECED Project and a measure of playgroup quality, key data which were collected in 2013. These additional data from 2013 allow us to predict key elements of sustainability that are not possible if we use the full sample of 432 project playgroups. In Appendix Table 1, we show that there are no significant differences in various baseline center characteristics between the 245 panel project playgroups in the main analytic sample and the full sample of 432 project playgroups. Thus, we consider the main analytic sample to be broadly representative of the 432 project playgroups in these villages.

> 9 For details of the design of the evaluation see Pradhan et al, 2013. For detailed results on children’s developmental outcomes see Jung and Hasan, 2016 and Brinkman et al. 2017.

> 10 That is not to say that they had higher total enrollment overall.

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