Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Yousafzai's work focuses on:

• Developing new interventions and approaches to promote early child development with a particular interest in how to strengthen child and caregiving related outcomes through existing health, nutrition and education systems.

• Understanding the implementation structures and processes for early childhood interventions to achieve sustainable impact at-scale.

• Promoting capacity development in local communities, services and systems for the effective delivery of interventions to promote early child development.

She has extensive experience in evaluating early childhood interventions in south Asia, east Africa, and in central and east Europe. One of Dr. Yousafzai’s most significant studies is the Pakistan Early Child Development Scale-Up (PEDS) trial, a cluster randomized controlled trial evaluating responsive stimulation and nutrition interventions to strengthen early child development and growth outcomes. The PEDS trial cohort is currently being followed-up at age 8 years old to investigate early intervention effects at school-age. This is one of the few studies to test the effects of integrating a psychosocial stimulation intervention in a large-scale community health service and to examine the long-term intervention effects on development and growth in a low- and middle-income population. She is also the PI of a randomized controlled trial in Pakistan investigating the impacts of community youth leaders delivering early childhood care and learning interventions on a host of early childhood and community outcomes. Dr. Yousafzai has written extensively about early childhood interventions in low- and middle-income countries including recent articles in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Annual Review of Psychology, Lancet, Lancet Global Health, and Pediatrics.