Building an Embedded Lab to Transform Childhood Development Programs in Colombia

Colombia Education

Building an Embedded Lab to Transform Childhood Development Programs in Colombia

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Overview

IPA Colombia has partnered with the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF in Spanish), the leading government agency for childhood development and child rights protection1 in Colombia, to establish an Embedded Evidence Lab. The Lab helps improve policymaking by integrating data and evidence into ICBF's processes. It has supported the design and implementation of four innovative childhood development programs while transforming how ICBF designs programs and monitors their effectiveness nationwide. 
 

Context 

ICBF delivers childhood development services to over 2 million children across Colombia through various programs and services, ranging from community-led childcare to comprehensive education centers. 

The partnership between IPA and ICBF began with a goal of integrating evidence and data use, learning, and innovation into ICBF’s organizational culture but evolved into a formal Lab as ICBF increasingly embraces evidence-based decision-making. The Lab supports ICBF teams to develop innovative interventions, adapt proven ones to Colombia's context, and strengthen program officers' capacity to use data to guide decision-making and develop innovative services. 

The Lab serves as an incubator for high-impact, evidence-based solutions that can be scaled to support children and their families reach their full potential.
 

Lab Approach 

The Lab operates within ICBF’s Planning Directorate and closely collaborates with ICBF’s specialized departments in charge of service delivery (with an emphasis on ECD). Currently, the team consists of four full-time staff members who collaborate with IPA’s staff. The lab team has collectively defined and standardized the Lab’s internal processes, workflows, and tools, defined its internal organizational structure, and developed strategies to institutionalize and consolidate the Lab. 

The Lab uses the “Learning Path” to map which services2 are relevant to each program’s learning needs according to their maturity stage. The Learning Path recognizes that the key questions evolve as programs progress through their life cycle—from ideation to refinement, evaluation, and consolidation— and offers tools designed to generate the right answers to the right questions at the right time. 

Learning path
Figure 1. The four stages of the Learning Path

Programs advance through the Learning Path by completing four-stage agile iteration cycles: identifying and prioritizing learning questions, selecting the tools and research strategies best suited to answer those questions, deploying the tools to gather the necessary data and evidence, and closing the cycle by refining the program based on the reviewed evidence. This approach uses dynamic adaptation to enhance implementation outcomes and ensures effectiveness, relevance, and scalability. 

Figure 2. Lab’s iteration cycle structure
Figure 2. Lab’s iteration cycle structure


Institutionalization Process

As part of its agenda, the Lab also leads efforts to transform ICBF’s organizational culture and internal processes towards evidence use and learning. To this end, the Lab is currently working to update ICBF’s internal process for designing and redesigning services to center the Lab’s core iterative and data-driven approach. Once approved, all new and existing programs will follow this standardized approach, ensuring that decisions are rooted in rigorous data and evidence analysis. Likewise, the Lab is directing efforts to modify ICBF’s legal charters so they include provisions to strengthen evidence use. 

Furthermore, the lab is also supporting the transformation of most of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) and Research processes of ICBF. For example, the Lab provided technical support to ICBF’s Research and Evaluation Unit to modify the process of selecting services to be evaluated externally, and to enhance the adoption of recommendations derived from these evaluations. To this effort, the Lab is also exploring strategies to strengthen ICBF’s use of administrative data to inform decision-making. 

Finally, to prepare ICBF staff for this transition IPA provides training to ICBF’s staff on MEL tools and strategies to promote progressive learning and improvement. This includes training on Theories of Change, development of Learning Agendas and Monitoring and Data Use plans, and design and implementation of qualitative and quantitative research strategies, among others.
 

Lab Achievements 

ICBF Lab collaborates with four technical teams to nurture evidence-based programs that transform children’s lives: 

  • Sanar para Crecer (SpC)
    • Program Description: SpC aims to enhance ECD workers’ socio-emotional skills and mental well-being through mindfulness-based practices. Given the close correlation between children’s well-being and their caregivers’ well-being, SpC also fosters the children’s socioemotional learning by equipping their caregivers with the tools to both manage their own emotions and teach children to manage theirs. 
    • Lab Services and Support: In 2023, the Lab, with support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), conducted an experimental evaluation to assess the impact of SpC on ECD workers. The evaluation’s results showed SpC’s potential to improve the socio-emotional well-being of ECD workers and foster socioemotional skills in children. The Lab is now collaborating with ICBF to implement SpC at the national level while preserving its impact at scale, and by the end of 2024, ICBF will have reached over 2,000 ECD workers nationwide. 
  • Apapacho
    • Program Description: Apapacho focuses on preventing domestic violence against children by promoting quality interactions between children and their caregivers, enhancing parent’s knowledge of children's developmental needs at different ages, and guiding participants to adopt caring parenting practices. This program was developed through a research-practice partnership formed in 2021 between ICBF, IPA Colombia, Fundación Apapacho, and researchers from Universidad de los Andes and the CARE Lab at New York University. 
    • Lab Services and Support: With support from the Lab, Apapacho’s initial design was prototyped in 2023, and then the team launched a small-scale pilot with 300 caregivers in 2024. The Lab is currently running a process evaluation to understand how to maximize Apapacho’s impact on caregivers and it’s aiming to evaluate Apapacho’s impact through a randomized-controlled trial in 2025. 
  • BienVenir
    • Program Description: Bienvenir is ICBF’s specialized service for pregnant women. It focuses on empowering them and their communities by enhancing families’ knowledge about childbearing, nudging families to progressively share caretaking activities, and supporting people as they experience motherhood. 
    • Lab Services and Support: The Lab has worked alongside Bienvenir’s team to inform the program’s design with evidence, and we are currently implementing a learning agenda focused on generating insights from the program’s pilot implementation. Based on the learnings from this agenda, ICBF will refine the program and start to scale it up. 
  • Tejiendo Caminos
    • Program Description: Tejiendo Caminos is a mobile strategy to provide ECD services to migrant children and their families, based on supporting caregivers in developing strategies to connect and care for their children as they migrate. 
    • Lab Services and Support: The Lab’s support has focused on generating learnings to refine Tejiendo Caminos’ model, and on equipping ICBF with evidence to navigate some of the operational complexities of providing services to families as they continue in the migration journey. 

These programs have helped the Lab strengthen its frameworks and processes while supporting ICBF's transition to evidence-based decision-making. The experience has provided valuable insights into governance, sustainability, and long-term strategy for embedding evidence use in government institutions.
 
 

Publications 

  1. ICBF employs around 142,000 ECD workers who serve more than 2 million children and pregnant women across the country. It also manages 2.1% of Colombia's total national budget, which represents approximately 15.5% of the combined annual budget for education, health, and social protection in Colombia ($2.2 billion USD).
  2. It combines qualitative and quantitative research strategies including (but not limited to) focus groups and interviews, surveys, literature reviews, experimental evaluations, and user-centered design methodologies.