A global call to action for early childhood

Early child development: A powerful equaliser
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national development policies and in
the national development frameworks/
instruments (SWAPs, PRSPs, Fast Track
Initiatives, etc.).
5. WHO should provide technical
support to regions, countries, and
partners for the integration of simple
ECD interventions such as the IMCI
Care for Development intervention
in health services and in community
health initiatives.
6. Assessing the costs and benefits
of programmes remains a challenge,
but WHO should take responsibility for
gathering data on the effectiveness of
interventions, especially those that are
connected to the health care system.
7. WHO should commit to
overseeing an interagency
collaboration for scaling up ECD
programmes through district health
systems in several countries to develop
models and to disseminate these
findings to all countries.
Generating the necessary commitment
at multiple levels of society
8. Local, regional, and national
governments should incorporate the
“science of early child development”
into policy.
9. To achieve a global consensus on
the importance of ECD, there is a need
to foster a broader and more profound
understanding of what is involved
in ECD, and to convey it to a much
wider audience than in the past. This
effort should take shape as a social
marketing campaign that expands
to include audiences not traditionally
thought of as ECD stakeholders,
for example, finance and planning
departments of government, the
economic sector, the corporate world,
and media.
10. The Consultative Group on ECCD
(a consortium that includes WHO,
UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank and
key INGOs) should continue to focus
on broad dissemination of the science
of ECD in conjunction with a social
marketing campaign.
11. Governments, by ratifying the
Convention on the Rights of the
Child, have committed themselves
to realising rights in early childhood.
Implementation pilots, like those
in Jamaica, are designed to raise
consciousness among families,
communities, service providers, and
policy makers about rights in early
childhood, and should be a model of
how to conduct such campaigns in
other countries.
12. There must be a fully funded
global capacity-building strategy to
assist countries in incorporating the
science of early child development
into policy and implementing and
monitoring rights in early childhood
under the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child.
Structural requirements for
implementation
13. Governments should create an
interministerial policy framework
for ECD that clearly articulates the
roles and responsibilities of each
sector and how they will collaborate.
Governments should also integrate
ECD policy elements into the agendas
of each sector to ensure that they
are considered routinely in sectoral
decision making. Governments
will need to reallocate resources to
decrease inequities in access to highquality
ECD programmes and services;
to facilitate this reallocation, our
review has identified evidence that can
be used as a benchmark for judging
the quality of ECD programmes and
services.
14. Children benefit most when
national governments adopt child- and
family-friendly policies that guarantee
adequate income for all, maternity
benefits, and financial support for the
ultra-poor. Governments should take
up the challenge of creating policies
that allow parents and caregivers to
balance their home and work lives by
putting systems in place to ensure that
quality out-of-home community-based
child care relevant to local culture and
Cambodia: Jim Holmes
COORDINATORS’ NOTEBOOK: ISSUE 29