Chapter 2. Progress towards the EFA goals - Unesco

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CHAPTER 2
Education for All Global Monitoring Report
High-quality care
in the early years
can act as
a springboard for
success in school
Early childhood care
and education
Goal 1: Expanding and improving comprehensive
early childhood care and education, especially for
the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
‘Five- and six-year-old children are the inheritors
of poverty’s curse and not its creators. Unless we
act these children will pass it onto the next
generation like a family birthmark.’
These remarks by United States President Lyndon
B. Johnson (1965) retain a powerful resonance.
Early childhood can create the foundations for a life
of expanded opportunity – or it can lock children into
a future of deprivation and marginalization. There is
strong – and growing – evidence that high-quality
care in the early years can act as a springboard
for success in school. In turn, education provides
vulnerable and disadvantaged children with a
chance to escape poverty, build a more secure
future and realize their potential. The past decade
has witnessed rapid and sustained increases in the
number of children entering primary school in the
world’s poorest countries. Yet every year millions
of children start school carrying the handicap
that comes with the experience of malnutrition,
ill health and poverty in their early years.
For many that experience starts, quite literally,
in the womb and continues through the early years.
Maternal undernutrition and the failure of health
systems to provide effective antenatal support,
along with safe delivery and post-natal care,
contribute to child mortality. They also help transmit
educational disadvantage across generations.
Malnutrition before children enter school is another
formidable barrier to education. Apart from
threatening lives, it robs children of the opportunity
to develop their potential for learning. That is why
the eradication of child malnutrition should be
viewed not just as a development imperative in
its own right, but as a key element in the Education
for All agenda.
Effective early childhood care and education can
give children a better chance of escaping what
President Johnson called ‘poverty’s curse’. While
much has been achieved, the monitoring evidence
set out in this section suggests that far more has to
be done. To summarize some of the key messages:
Malnutrition needs to be recognized as both a
health and an education emergency. Malnutrition
is damaging the bodies and minds of around
178 million young children each year,
undermining their potential for learning,
reinforcing inequality in education and beyond,
and reducing the efficiency of investment in
school systems.
Improved access to maternal and child health
care should be seen as a high priority for
education, as well as for public health. Charging
fees for basic services is locking millions of
vulnerable women out of health systems and
exposing their children to unnecessary risks.
As in the education sector, the elimination of
user fees should be treated as a high priority.
Governments need to tackle inequality in access
to early childhood care. Those in greatest need of
early childhood care – and with the most to gain
from it – have the least access. In both rich and
poor countries, parental income and education
heavily influence who attends pre-school
programmes, pointing to the need for greater
equity in public provision and financing.
This section is divided into two parts. Part 1
reviews progress and the current status of some
key indicators of child well-being and nutrition
in developing countries, and highlights the strong
links between maternal and child health. Part 2
provides a snapshot of access to early childhood
programmes across the world, along with
evidence that these programmes can play an
important role in equalizing opportunity and
overcoming marginalization.
Malnutrition and ill health —
a ‘silent emergency’ in education
With some notable exceptions, governments
across the world have failed to accelerate progress
in combating child hunger. And with the sharp
hike in global food prices during 2007 and 2008,
and the economic downturn pushing more children
into poverty, a picture that was already bleak has
been deteriorating.
Retarded growth in the womb, early-childhood
stunting and anaemia are not typically viewed
as mainstream education issues. The evidence
strongly suggests that they should be. Each of
these conditions can have profound and
irreversible effects on a child’s ability to learn,
undermining the potential benefits of education.
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