Early Childhood Matters 2019

Anyone working to make life better for babies, toddlers and their caregivers will find knowledge and inspiration in the 2019 edition of Early Childhood Matters. Readers will gain insight into work being done to improve opportunities for young children from Chad to China, from Romania to India, from Peru to Kyrgyzstan. Across the 32 articles, authors explore how young children and their caregivers can be supported in areas as diverse as nutrition, refugees, street design, and mobile technology.

Authors include María Fernanda Espinosa, President of the United Nations General Assembly; Daniel Kablan Duncan, Vice-President of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire; Hugo de Jonge, Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands; Geraldo Júlio, Mayor of Recife; Kate Hampton, Chief Executive Officer of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation; and Gerda Verburg, Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement.

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Editorial

To thrive: a goal for children everywhere

Joan Lombardi

Leadership

Bold leadership – or as we see it, the ability to mobilise people to solve important problems collectively – is crucial to achieving results for young children. In this section, leaders from governments, international organisations and funders around the world talk about why they have chosen to put babies, toddlers and the people who care for them high on their agenda.

Early childhood: why we need to invest in the future of cities

Geraldo Júlio

Solid Start: supporting municipalities to tailor solutions for children’s first 1000 days

Hugo de Jonge

Scaling

There are many pathways to scale – taking a successful small programme, and making it work for hundreds of thousands of children – but the challenges are complex. In this section, practitioners and policymakers explore issues such as coordinating across different parts of government, financing, recruiting and training large numbers of workers, testing and learning, and putting systems in place that deliver consistent, cost-effective quality.

Using the power of mass media to achieve impact at scale: an experiment that worked

Sherrie Westin

The Global Scale for Early Development (GSED)

GSED team

The Global Financing Facility: investing in the early years

Mariam Claeson

Key principles for financing a qualified early childhood workforce

Mark Roland et al.

Inter-sectoral coordination in early childhood systems: the Primokiz approach

Konstantina Rentzou et al.

Loving fathers, thriving children: opportunities for scaling gender-transformative approaches

Helena Duch et al.

Lessons learned from national government- led efforts to reduce adolescent pregnancy in Chile, England and Ethiopia

Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli et al.

Scaling nurturing care through a multi-sectoral, bottom-up approach in the Kyrgyz Republic

Sweta Shah et al.

Giving newborns the best start: scaling-up interventions to increase early initiation of breastfeeding in South East Asia

Joy Miller Del Rosso

Innovations

Before good practices can be taken to scale, we first need good ideas. In this section, we focus on innovations – new or emerging programmes, policies or services which have the potential to meet the needs of young children and their caregivers in a wider range of contexts.

Increasing the impact of early childhood programmes through behavioural science: initial prospects

Sam Sternin

Istanbul95: innovating with partners

Yiğit Aksakoğlu

The Urban95 Challenge: crowdsourcing ideas to improve city livability for caregivers and kids

Ardan Kockelkoren

Philanthropy and government working together for a child-friendly Shenzhen

Wenfeng Huang

Building cognitive capital, brightening China’s future: piloting community- based early childhood programming

Xuefeng Chen et al.

BRAC Humanitarian Play Lab: when playing becomes healing

Erum Mariam et al.

From little ripples to big waves: comprehensive early childhood programming for young refugee children

Kelsey Dalrymple et al.

LEAPS: a strategy to benefit young children and youth

Aisha K. Yousafzai et al.

mThrive: a nurturing care app that supports community health workers

Rob Hughes et al.

Empowering frontline early childhood workers through technology in India

Mohini Kak

Global impressions

In this section, we present brief summaries of initiatives, publications or other resources which have come to our attention in the past year and which we believe deserve a wider audience.

Using cash transfers to boost early childhood development: training parents on child stimulation

Laura B. Rawlings et al.

The case for inclusive education

Dragana Sretenov et al.

Air pollution and child health: prescribing clean air

Julia Gorman et al.

The effects of transportation on early childhood development

Julien Vincelot et al.

Designing streets for kids: possibilities for children in the built environment

Skye Duncan et al.

Drone photography improves understanding of spaces for children in Lima

Martin Benavides Abanto et al.

Issue Colophon

Production editor: Teresa Moreno
Guest editor: Joan Lombardi
Consultant editor: Andrew Wright
Text editing: Margaret Mellor
Graphic design: Laura de Jongh
Illustrations: Gemma Pauwels
Production support: Cathleen Owens

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