# **I. Introduction**

As the international community adopts and implements the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a growing concern is whether interventions established by donor funding are sustainable. As an illustration, between 2001 and 2013, the World Bank invested USD 3.3 billion in early childhood development through 273 investment projects (Sayre et al. 2015). This figure jumped to roughly USD 1.1 billion per year between 2014 and 2017.<sup>1</sup> Although investments in early childhood education have increased, we know very little about whether and how these investments are sustained. A review of the literature suggests that as few as 36% of projects include goals related to sustainability (Chapman and Moore 2010).

In this paper, we document the sustainability of a large-scale development project in the world’s fourth largest country – Indonesia. Covering 50 districts across the country, the project ran from 2009 to 2013. In this time it increased access to early childhood education and development (ECED) services in 3,000 villages for over 634,000 children (World Bank 2014) by providing block grants to villages to establish up to two playgroups, providing teacher training and raising community awareness about the importance of ECED. Villages included in the project were selected on the basis of their poverty rates, having large populations – particularly of children in the target age-range for the project playgroups (age 3-4) – and community interest in supporting these services.<sup>2</sup> On average, the sample of households targeted by the project was broadly representative of the rural population in Indonesia at the time.<sup>3</sup> We revisited villages in 2016 – 3 years after the project had closed and project funding had ended – to assess whether project services had been sustained.

We define sustainability as the continued use of project components beyond their initial funding period (Scheirer and Dearing 2011; Shediac-Rizkallah and Bone 1998; Bamberger and Cheema 1990). Specifically, we measure sustainability of the early childhood education project in two ways: (i) whether there is continued delivery of early childhood education after external funding ended (i.e. whether project playgroups were still in operation) and (ii) whether there is continued employment of teachers trained under the project after external funding ended. This paper uses a unique panel data set on playgroups established under the project. Data were collected at the beginning of the project in 2010, at the end of the project in 2013, and three years after project funding ended in 2016.

We focus on the sustainability of this early childhood education project given the growing importance of increasing investments around the globe in early human capital development and the importance of early childhood education opportunities in promoting female labor force participation. Under the SDGs, the global community has committed that by 2030 “all girls and boys [will] have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education” (United Nations 2015). However, the global gross enrollment ratio in pre-primary education is still low at 44% (UNESCO 2015), which suggests the need for greater investments in early childhood education over the next decade. As pre-primary education is generally not included in compulsory education, much of this investment will likely come from project-type interventions given that the majority (over 53%) of global disbursements

> 1 Investing in Every Child’s Early Years: World Bank Contributions. Accessed on August 12, 2019. Available at: <u>https://results.org/blog/investing_in_every_childs_early_years_world_bank_contributions/.</u> 2 For details refer to Appendix 4 in Hasan, Hyson and Chang, 2013.

> 3 A comparison of assets ownership by households in the evaluation sample with that of the rural sub-sample of the SUSENAS (a nationally representative household survey) suggests average rates of asset ownership and education levels are by and large similar between the two.

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