Early Childhood Matters 2019

Table of contents
Issue details
Resources

Table of contents

Editorial

Show Hide articles

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.

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.

Show Hide articles

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 and Michelle Neuman

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

Konstantina Rentzou, Mihaela Ionescu, Philine Zimmerli and Cristiana Boca

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

Helena Duch, Kate Doyle, Anjalee Kohli, Ruti G. Levtov and Rebecka Lundgren

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

Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli, Marina Plesons, Alison Hadley, Matilde Maddaleno, Lemessa Oljira, Senait Tibebu, Elsie Akwara and Danielle Engel

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

Sweta Shah and Burulai Aitikulova

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.

Show Hide articles

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 and Qi Zhao

BRAC Humanitarian Play Lab: when playing becomes healing

Dr. Erum Mariam, Syeda Sazia Zaman, Sakila Yesmin, Sadaf Huq and Sarwat Sarah Sarwar

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

Kelsey Dalrymple and Sara-Christine Dallain

LEAPS: a strategy to benefit young children and youth

Aisha K. Yousafzai, Muneera A. Rasheed, Saima Siyal, Emily Franchett, Christopher Sudfeld, Liliana A. Ponguta, Chin Reyes and Günther Fink

mThrive: a nurturing care app that supports community health workers

Rob Hughes, Beatrice Wasunna, Dickens Omedo and Najma Rashid

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.

Issue details

The views expressed in Early Childhood Matters are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Van Leer Foundation. Work featured is not necessarily funded by the Van Leer Foundation.

Reproduction of articles by photocopying or electronic means for non-commercial purposes is permitted. However, it is requested that the author, Early Childhood Matters and Van Leer Foundation are cited as the source of the information. Permission must be obtained to use photos. ISSN 1387-9553

Cover: Father and child sharing a special moment together in Mumbai, India.

Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Van Leer Foundation

This 2019 issue of Early Childhood Matters is no. 128 in the series. Also published in Spanish: Espacio para la Infancia (ISSN 1566-6476)

Colophon

Guest editor

Joan Lombardi

Current-Principal Advisor and Adjunct Professor, Stanford Center on Early Childhood, Guest Editor from 2015-2019, Early Childhood Matters

Production editor

Teresa Moreno

Consultant editor

Andrew Wright

Text editing

Margaret Mellor

Graphic design

Laura de Jongh

Illustrations

Gemma Pauwels

Production support

Cathleen Owens

Resources

Social media toolkit

Hoping this issue of Early Childhood Matters is a valuable resource for you, we encourage to share with your network. Below some infographics, and a more detailed guidelines with suggested messages and tweets.

Latest Issues

Explore a complete archive of all issues from 1998 to present day.

Issue 2026