Evidence Generation
Asia
Evidence Generation
Asia
Violence against children remains a persistent challenge in Colombia and globally. Approximately 60 percent of children under five worldwide experience physical or psychological punishment (UNICEF, 2025). Moreover, more than half of children under five experience physical or psychological punishment at home,2 and over 30 percent of women report intimate partner violence in their lifetime.3 Parenting programs can reduce violence in the home and improve child outcomes,4 but two gaps limit their reach. First, most programs target only mothers, which leaves fathers out of the practices and leaves unaddressed the gender norms that underlies both forms of violence.5 Second, few programs in low- and middle-income countries are designed to run through government systems at scale, which hampers their impact when governments take on implementation. This has also limited the available evidence on whether their impact survives that transition.6
Apapáchar was built to close these gaps. It brings together two programs developed in Colombia: Apapacho, Fundación Apapacho's parenting program focused on positive discipline and early childhood development, and Paternar, Equimundo's Colombian adaptation of its flagship Program P, which intentionally engaged fathers and families in caring and gender-transformative parenting practices.
Merged into a single 12-week hybrid program, Apapáchar combines weekly WhatsApp group interaction with monthly in-person sessions, delivered by ICBF's ECD workers. Apapáchar’s curriculum covers parenting skills, positive discipline, gender-equitable caregiving, decision making, conflict resolution and active father engagement.
IPA, ICBF, Fundación Apapacho and Equimundo developed Apapáchar inside the Embedded Evidence Lab, an in-house unit specialized in using evidence, data, and iterative learning to incubate and strengthen evidence-based programs within ICBF’s standard service delivery systems, ensuring impact and sustainability at scale. This evaluation was built on two earlier pilots: A 2024 pilot with 300 caregivers in Bogotá and Soacha tested the caregiving curriculum. Pilot results showed promising improvements in responsive caregiving beliefs, increase in stimulating activities, and a reduction in acceptance of violent discipline.7 In parallel, Equimundo piloted the fatherhood and hybrid components with 303 families, enrolling 180 fathers within three weeks, reaching high retention rates and shifting harmful gender roles.
IPA Colombia conducted a randomized evaluation to measure the impact of Apapáchar. The intervention took place between 2025 and 2026, covering 77 ICBF service units serving more than 1,400 families across four municipalities and three regions. The service units were randomly assigned to either participate in Apapachar or serve as a comparison group.
Researchers measured early childhood development, use of violent punishment, acceptance of violent punishment, parenting practices, gender attitudes and norms, and use of learning materials at home.
Overall, Apapáchar improved children's development while shifting the attitudes and norms that sustain violence at home, and it reached fathers through ICBF's existing services. Apapáchar improved child development by 0.07 to 0.29 SD and increased families' use of learning materials at home by 0.09 SD. It also reduced violent discipline by 8 percentage points (or roughly 18 percent relative to the baseline prevalence), lowered caregivers' acceptance of violence by 0.13 SD, and shifted harmful gender stereotypes and norms in the household by 0.18 SD. Relative to other parenting programs, this is in the median of the distribution of effects. The evaluation surveyed mothers and fathers separately, with men making up 47 percent of the participants, and found that Apapáchar benefited men and women equally, with no significant difference in effects by caregiver gender.
Caregivers in focus groups described learning to pause before reacting in difficult moments, replacing shouting and physical punishment with routines and explanation, while fathers reported taking on daily caregiving they had previously left to mothers and questioning the gender norms they grew up with. These accounts were consistent across the four municipalities. Altogether, most participants said they would recommend the program.
As part of the evaluation, the team also ran a cost-effectiveness analysis, which estimated delivery at USD 55.18 per participant (excluding design costs), low enough to make national scale-up affordable for ICBF. This cost is significantly lower than that from similar programs (adjusted to 2026 USD): Sanar para Crecer in Colombia (USD 505.70), Sugira Muryango in Rwanda (USD 558.32), Parenting for Lifelong Health in South Africa (USD 668.75), and Cuna Más home visiting in Peru (USD 689.01). Cost sits at a similar rate compared to fully digital programs (Afini USD 43.62, Virtual Irie Home Toolbox USD 65.57),
Four different cost-effectiveness estimates were developed, one for each of the prioritized impact measures. These were the decrease in the share of parents using physical violence to discipline their children, the decrease in harmful attitudes towards women, increase in child development ages 0-36 months, and the increase in child development ages 37-60 months measured with the CREDI score. Dividing discounted impact by discounted costs yields USD 417.14 per parent not using violent discipline, USD 278.09 per SD gender attitudes reduction, USD 1,033.71 per SD child development gain (0-36 months), and USD 643.59 per SD gain (37-60 months).
Apapáchar's development applied IPA's Scaling Ingredients Framework, which guides iterative cycles of diagnosis, piloting, adaptation, and evaluation to advance a program from pilot to government delivery. Applied to Apapáchar, it helped the team assess ICBF's readiness to scale and monitor the fidelity and quality of implementation.
Building on the results of the evaluation, ICBF is launching in 2026 a national rollout of Apapáchar across 10 regions, the first step toward its commitment to reach every family in its early childhood system by 2030. Colombia's National Pedagogical Strategy Against Physical Punishment mandates a universal violence-prevention parenting program, and ICBF projects that the strategy will eventually reach 2.7 million children and their caregivers.
With support from IPA, ICBF, Fundación Apapacho, and Equimundo are continuing to work together as the program scales, with four priorities:
1. UNICEF, "Violent discipline," UNICEF, June 2026, https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-protection/violence/violent-discipline/
2. Together for Girls. 2020. Violence Against Children and Youth Survey: Colombia Report.
3. OECD. 2024. Society at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean. Paris: OECD Publishing.
4. Backhaus, S., Leijten, P., Jochim, J., Melendez-Torres, G. J., & Gardner, F. (2023). Effects over time of parenting interventions to reduce physical and emotional violence against children: a systematic review and meta-analysis. EClinicalMedicine, 60.
Cuartas, Jorge, Luciana Beccassino, Helen Baker-Henningham, Oscar Pineda, and María Fernanda Rodríguez. (2024). “Prevention of Violence Against Children: A Qualitative Examination of the Implementation Ecosystem of Parenting Programmes in Colombia.” Child: Care, Health and Development 50 (5): e13325.
Cuartas, Jorge, Juliana Borbón, Luciana Beccassino, Isabella García, Catalina Rey-Guerra, Manuela Guerra, Gabriela Moreno, María C. Agudo, Mateo Valderrama, Daniela Trujillo, and Oscar Pineda. 2026. “The Apapacho Early Childhood Violence Prevention Parenting Program: A Mixed Methods Pilot Evaluation.” Child Abuse & Neglect 174: 107951.
5. Cuartas, J., Lansford, J. E., Backhaus, S., Freire, S., & Jeong, J. (2026). Supporting parenting in early childhood to foster human development and mental health. Nature Mental Health, 1-11.
UNICEF Innocenti - Global Office of Research and Foresight, Prevention Collaborative and Equimundo. 2023. Parenting Programmes to Reduce Violence against Children and Women. Why it is important. Brief 1, UNICEF Innocenti, Florence.
6. Britto, P. R., Bradley, R. H., Yoshikawa, H., Ponguta, L. A., Richter, L., & Kotler, J. A. (2022). The future of parenting programs: III uptake and scale. Parenting, 22(3), 258-275.
Shenderovich, Yulia, Jamie M. Lachman, Catherine L. Ward, et al. 2021. “The Science of Scale for Violence Prevention: A New Agenda for Family Strengthening in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.” Frontiers in Public Health 9: 581440.
7. Cuartas, Jorge, Juliana Borbón, Luciana Beccassino, Isabella García, Catalina Rey-Guerra, Manuela Guerra, Gabriela Moreno, María C. Agudo, Mateo Valderrama, Daniela Trujillo, and Oscar Pineda. 2026. “The Apapacho Early Childhood Violence Prevention Parenting Program: A Mixed Methods Pilot Evaluation.” Child Abuse & Neglect 174: 107951.
