Early Childhood

Children everywhere need enough nutritious food and stimulation to grow and develop to their full potential. Yet many disadvantaged children in low-income countries do not receive the support they need in the first years of life, negatively affecting their future health, education, and earnings. This research in Colombia shows that it is possible to deliver a model of early childhood education at scale and through existing government services.

This report provides updated analysis on the current distribution of resources in preuniversityeducation and identifies directions for further policy analysis, but it does not provide comprehensive policy recommendations. This report provides updated available analysis on sector priorities, demographic trends, coverage, system performance and education outcomes, with a focus on the current distribution of resources in pre-university education in selected entities and cantons.

The development of pertinent and effective in-service teacher training remains a policy challenge for many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ecuador stands out as a country in the region that has made significant investments in teacher training in the past decade. However, most in-service training provision has been designed without enough elements to properly address teachers' skills gaps. This paper proposes a roadmap for improving the design of in-service teacher training in Ecuador using available data from student and teacher assessments.

This paper discusses an example of an early childhood development facility intervention in the Khanty-Mansyisk region of the Russian Federation and its potential to produce efficiency gains in the region and the country overall. The government of the region is introducing changes to the built environment of its early childhood development centers. The proposed new design is based on the concept of the learning environment as a third teacher.

The SABER-ECD initiative is designed to enable ECD policy makers and development partners to identify opportunities for further development of effective ECD systems. This Country Report presents a framework to compare Romania’s system with other countries in the region and internationally. Each of the nine policy levers are examined in detail and some policy options are identified to strengthen ECD are offered.

This report assesses the key constraints on the supply of (quantity and quality) and demand for early childhood development (ECD) services for pregnant women and children under the age of five in Armenia and puts forth recommendations on how to improve access to ECD services for poor and socially vulnerable families. The government of the Republic of Armenia, with support from the World Bank and other development partners, is currently expanding the existing social work system in Armenia to more actively link vulnerable families to ECD services.

Using a new data set comprised of publicly available information, this paper provides cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social spending that covers the three sectors of health, education, and social protection has proven to be a challenging task. Only for health spending is there high data coverage over time and across countries. Education and, especially, social protection display large gaps. Increases in social sector spending have generally been slow and unsteady.

Human capital is central to the World Bank Group’s efforts to end extreme poverty by 2030 and raise the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of people in each country. The vision of the Human Capital Project is a world in which all children reach their full potential growing up well-nourished and ready to learn, attain real learning in the classroom, and enter the job market as healthy, skilled, and productive adults.