# Evaluation of social policies to reduce intimate partner violence and improve child health in low- and middle-income countries

> **NIH NIH K99** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2022 · $130,842

## Abstract

Project summary
The PI’s long-term objective is to improve the health and well-being of women and their children in low- and
middle-income countries (LMICs) through evidence-informed structural interventions, which will be made
possible by the training and mentorship provided from the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award. The
research proposed in this award will evaluate the effect of social policies that protect and support women on
reductions in intimate partner violence (IPV) and improvements in the health of their children under 5 years of
age in LMICs. This research will fill an important evidence gap. The IPV prevention literature has focused
primarily on interventions that target individuals, households, or communities, and the effect of social policies is
not well understood. During the K99 portion of the award, the PI will receive training and mentorship at
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health from a cross-disciplinary mentoring team with
substantial experience mentoring early career investigators. Training areas will include child health, including
conceptual knowledge of potential pathways linking IPV to child health; causal mediation analysis; and
econometrics, which are methods commonly used to evaluate social policies. This training will enable the PI to
conduct three social policy evaluations in diverse LMIC settings. The first project will evaluate adoption of
national-level IPV prevention legislation on changes in IPV and improvements in child health. This work will
utilize Demographic and Health Survey data from 24 LMICs, linked with policy data collected from the World
Bank. The second project will evaluate the effect of availability of a cash grant for low-income, primarily female-
headed households in South Africa, on the health of children under 5 years of age. The project will perform a
causal mediation analysis to formally test if improvements in child health are mediated through reductions in
maternal IPV-related factors. This work will utilize longitudinal data from the South Africa National Income
Dynamics Study, which is a large population-based panel survey. The third project will evaluate the degree of
implementation of comprehensive IPV-prevention legislation in India on maternal IPV-related factors and child
health. This work will utilize longitudinal data from the India Human Development Survey, a large population-
based panel survey, linked with legislative data collected from an Indian legal advocacy group. The results of
these studies will substantially increase knowledge about the effect of social policies on reducing IPV and
improving child health across a wide range of LMIC settings. The training, mentorship, and research afforded
by this award will help the PI develop into an independent investigator who evaluates structural interventions to
improve the health of mothers and their children in LMICs. This proposed research furthers NICHD’s mandate
of improving child health by investigating ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10399553
- **Project number:** 5K99HD104896-02
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Robin Richardson
- **Activity code:** K99 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $130,842
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-05-01 → 2022-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10399553

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10399553, Evaluation of social policies to reduce intimate partner violence and improve child health in low- and middle-income countries (5K99HD104896-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10399553. Licensed CC0.

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