The Promise of Preschool in Africa:

*Acknowledgements: This report presents initial results of a community based preschool program implemented by Save the Children in the Gaza Province of Mozambique. We thank a number of colleagues and institutions that have assisted at various stages of the evaluation. Barbara Bruns played an instrumental role in launching this evaluation and formed an integral part of the evaluation design team. Vitor Pereira and John Bunge provided in-country field work coordination and supervision of data collection and Michelle Perez provided outstanding research assistance for this report. We received helpful comments from seminar participants at the World Bank and the Ministry of Education in Mozambique and we thank Renos Vakis and reviewers at Save the Children and 3ie for helpful comments on earlier versions of this report. We are grateful to all Save the Children staff that provided guidance and assistance for this evaluation, especially We appreciate support from the Mozambique Ministry of Education, Ministry of Women and Social Action, Ministry of Health, and the Early Childhood Development Working Group members who provided advice through the evaluation steering committee. We thank the survey teams at Austral-Cowi, in particular Isabel da Costa, Ercilio Infante, Arsenia Paulo, Sandra Roque and Elias Zavale. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the World Bank's Bank Netherlands Partnership Program (BNPP) Basic Education Program and Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF). Funding for the Save the Children ECD program implementation was supported by America Gives Back and The ELMA foundation. All findings and interpretations in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of their respective institutions, Save the Children, America Gives Back, The ELMA Foundation, or the Government of Mozambique.