The government of Colombia runs, since 1986, a program called Hogares Comunitarios. This is a large program of community nurseries. Parents of poor children can send them to one of the mothers in the community for a small fee that is used to pay her a wage. The Government provides food to the mother to feed the children three times a day. This program is the largest welfare intervention in Colombia, worth almost 0.2% of GDP and had never been systematically evaluated. Orazio Attanasio and Marcos Vera have used the data collected for the evaluation of Familias en Acción to perform such an evaluation. For each child in our survey we know whether he or she is attending a Hogar Comunitario, how many months of his or her life has spent in an Hogar and what is the distance from the closest Hogar Comunitario. Using an Instrumental Variable approach, where the distance is used as the identifying instrument, we find large effects of the program: a child who has spent all his life in a Hogar is one standard deviation (or more than 2 cm) taller than a child who has not gone. These results compare with OLS effects of zero. The negative bias of the OLS indicates that the poorest children are those attending the Hogares. This result indicates that the program is well targeted. We are in the process of comparing the Hogares Comunitarios program to Familias en Acción.

Papers

O. Attanasio and M. Vera : "Is it the Food? Children Height and Nutrition Interventions in rural Colombia"