Integrating early stimulation and play at scale: study protocol for "MAHAY Mikolo", a multi-arm cluster-randomized controlled trial.

Background: Hundreds of millions of children living in poverty worldwide are not reaching their full, developmental potential. Programs to promote nurturing and responsive caregiving, such as those in which community health workers (CHWs) conduct home visits to support optimal early childhood development (ECD), have been effective in small trials, but have not achieved similar success at scale. This study will explore two approaches to scale-up: converting a home-visiting model to a group-based model; and integrating the ECD curriculum into an existing government program.

Health, financial, and education gains of investing in preventive chemotherapy for schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminthiases, and lymphatic filariasis in Madagascar: A modeling study.

Background: Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) account for a large disease burden in sub-Saharan Africa. While the general cost-effectiveness of NTD interventions to improve health outcomes has been assessed, few studies have also accounted for the financial and education gains of investing in NTD control.

Methods: We built on extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) methods to assess the health gains (e.

Consuming sex: the association between modern goods, lifestyles and sexual behaviour among youth in Madagascar.

Background: Ethnographic evidence suggests that transactional sex is sometimes motivated by youth's interest in the consumption of modern goods as much as it is in basic survival. There are very few quantitative studies that examine the association between young people's interests in the consumption of modern goods and their sexual behaviour. We examined this association in two regions and four residence zones of Madagascar: urban, peri-urban and rural Antananarivo, and urban Antsiranana.