Early Childhood Development

To prepare for the future, countries must invest in the earliest years of their citizens’ lives. Robust scientific and economic evidence shows that experiences in early childhood have a profound impact on brain development with implications for learning, health, and adult productivity. How Africa manages the upcoming demographic transition will have an indelible influence on the continent’s growth and competitiveness, and requires addressing key human capital challenges.

Moldova’s public expenditures on education as a share of GDP and total public sector spending are higher than in most countries in the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Moldova’s challenges to improve the quality and efficiency of education provision need to be addressed in a context of declining student numbers, and persistent inequities between population groups. This report identifies key challenges to the adequate delivery of pre-school and general education related to the decentralized governance mechanism.

[SIEF, Impact Evaluation] Giving children access to quality early education can help prepare them for primary school by strengthening their physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development. But many children, especially those from poor and otherwise disadvantaged families, don't have the opportunity to attend preschool. Their families may not be able to afford to send them, may not recognize the importance of early education or may not have access to a quality program.

A country’s long-term development potential depends on how well it nurtures the healthy growth and development of its youngest children. The crosscutting issue affects sectors such as education, health, nutrition, and child and social protection. Addressing early childhood development (ECD) requires a comprehensive and integrated national system supported by multi-sectoral policy design and implementation.

The aim of the systems approach for better education results (SABER) - early childhood development (ECD) initiative is to collect, analyze, and disseminate comparable data about national and sub-national ECD policies across countries. The data will help the World Bank assess how well overall ECD systems, and those in the education, health, and nutrition sectors in particular, meet three widely shared goals: establishing an enabling environment, implementing widely, and monitoring and assuring quality.

Female labor force participation (FLFP) in Indonesia lags behind other countries in the region and has remained more or less unchanged since 1990. Descriptive evidence by the same authors points to unmet childcare needs as one constraint on FLFP. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of the impact of childcare availability on FLFP in Indonesia. Our findings suggest that access to public preschools leads to higher employment of mothers of age-eligible children, but access to private preschool does not.

This engagement note provides education sector policymakers with an overview of the status of education across the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and offers insight into the World Bank’s strategies and approaches to supporting education reform in the GCC region. While the Gulf countries are similar in many ways, each country has its own contextual factors and socioeconomic dynamic that may affect the process of education reform.

This study analyzed the impact of a community-based preschool program on child development and schooling outcomes in high-poverty areas of rural Mozambique. Preschools were randomly assigned to 30 of 76 eligible communities. Using a panel survey of 2,000 households with preschool aged children, the study found that children who attended preschool experienced gains in cognitive development, communication, fine motor skills, and socio-emotional skills, scoring 0.33 standard deviations higher on a child development screening test.

The aim of the systems approach for better education results (SABER) - early childhood development (ECD) initiative is to collect, analyze, and disseminate comparable data about national and sub-national ECD policies across countries. The data will help the World Bank assess how well overall ECD systems, and those in the education, health, and nutrition sectors in particular, meet three widely shared goals: establishing an enabling environment, implementing widely, and monitoring and assuring quality.