Universal Baby - Video Innovation for Infant Neurodevelopment in Peru

Over 200 million children worldwide are at risk of losing their developmental potential, creating and sustaining intergenerational poverty. Data is scarce but a pilot found that more than half of children in Lima, Peru, have neurodevelopmental delay. Research shows that early stimulation and responsive parent-child interactions help to build young neuronal density and buffer the effects of poverty. However, distributing this knowledge to vulnerable families has been a challenge. Socios En Salud (SES) Peru will test Universal Baby (UB), a game-changing, catalytic video intervention that dramatically mitigates cost and loss of information associated with training community health workers to coach parents. UB engages caregivers as social entrepreneurs by visually demonstrating short, graphically-enhanced, culturally-specific practices of serve and return interaction (S&R) to reach low-literate audiences through high-impact learning, to cultivate local caregiver knowledge and best practices. Community health workers will be trained to integrate UB in their home visits to impoverished young families. The approach innovates by integrating video, mobile technology, social media and social modeling, as a bold new way to scale and sustain intervention for child life outcomes. This project is funded under a collaborative agreement between CONCYTEC (Peru’s National Council for Science, Technology and Technological Innovation) and Grand Challenges Canada (funded by the Government of Canada) to support Stars in Global Health innovators based in Peru.