Early Childhood Development Overview

Investing in the early years is one of the smartest things a country can do to eliminate extreme poverty, boost shared prosperity, and create the human capital needed for economies to diversify and grow. Early childhood experiences have a profound impact on brain development – affecting learning, health, behavior, and, ultimately, productivity and income.

Yet today, millions of young children are not reaching their full potential because of inadequate nutrition, lack of early stimulation, learning, and nurturing care, and exposure to stress adversely affecting their development.

The challenge is substantial:

In low- and middle-income countries across the world, 250 million children under the age of five are at risk of not reaching their developmental potential because of poverty and stunting (or low height for age).
Worldwide, only 60 % of all three to six-year-olds have access to pre-primary education. In low-income countries, just one-in-five children has access to preschool.
One in 200 children in the world are displaced, exposing them to the kind of stress that can undermine their development.
Around the world, over 40 percent of children below primary-school-entry age – or nearly 350 million children – need childcare, but do not have access to it.

Smart investments in the physical, cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional development of young children – from before birth until they transition to primary school – are critical to put them on the path to greater prosperity, and to help countries be more productive and compete more successfully in a rapidly changing global economy.

A large body of evidence confirms that if we invest in high-quality programs that support children’s health, nutrition, and early learning, we can improve learning outcomes, and ultimately increase adult wages and productivity.

Last Updated: Apr 05, 2024

In response to convincing evidence about the benefits of investing in young children, as well as growing demand from countries, the World Bank is increasing its support of early childhood development (ECD) initiatives around the world through financing, policy advice, technical support, and partnership activities at the country, regional, and global levels.

The 2018 World Development Report “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise” highlights three approaches:

Targeting mothers and their babies with health and nutrition interventions during the first 1,000 days, a critical period of brain development.
Increasing the frequency and quality of stimulation and opportunities for home learning to improve cognitive, socio-emotional, and language development.
Ensuring high-quality childcare centers for young children and preschool programs for children 3 to 6 years old.

The World Bank leverages experts from education, nutrition, health, and social protection to build an evidence base, so that countries can craft programs that fit their needs and are also cost-effective. Through new reports such as Quality Early Learning: Nurturing Children’s Potential and Better Jobs and Brighter Futures: Investing in Childcare to Build Human Capital, as well as the Stepping up Early Childhood Development paper, the SABER Early Childhood Development initiative, and articles in leading journals like the Lancet Early Childhood Development Series, the World Bank is contributing to global knowledge around early childhood, highlighting new scientific evidence, building on existing findings, and proposing pathways for implementation of early childhood development at-scale.

Expanding measurement is a key pillar of the Bank’s Human Capital Project and its efforts to reduce Learning Poverty. We are dramatically scaling up our efforts to measure early childhood outcomes and the quality of early learning environments; building country capacity; and working towards the generation of globally comparable data on early childhood development, learning, and education quality. By taking a more coordinated and strategic approach across countries, the World Bank can improve and scale up ECD measurement globally, fill current knowledge gaps, and promote cross-country learning and synergies.

The World Bank team has developed a suite of tools to measure childhood development and early learning quality, including: the Anchor Items for Measuring Early Childhood Development (AIM-ECD), a core set of items with robust psychometric properties across contexts for measuring preschoolers’ early literacy, early numeracy, executive functioning, and socioemotional development; Teach ECE, an observation tool that captures the quality of teacher-child interactions in preschools; and COACH, an initiative to improve in-service teacher professional development and systems to accelerate learning.

Last Updated: Apr 05, 2024

Examples include:

Senegal: The Senegal Investing in the Early Years for Human Development Project is a multisectoral project that will reach 2.5 million children and their parents through integrated community-based nutrition, early stimulation and parenting education programs; enroll more than 210,000 children into formal preschools, Koranic preschools and community-based early learning programs; construct 220 preschool classrooms; and increase access to birth registration from 46 percent to 60 percent.

Madagascar: In Madagascar, where more than 50 percent of children are stunted, the National Community Nutrition Program is now reaching 2.1 million mothers and children under five years of age, delivering growth-monitoring activities, cooking demonstrations, and nutrition education through a network of more than 7,000 sites. Political instability and natural disasters make the country’s children particularly vulnerable. As part of a pilot program, families are receiving additional visits from community health workers who teach parents about the importance of early childhood stimulation. The results thus far are encouraging and show that intensive counseling, combined with nutrient supplements, could be an important intervention in Madagascar.

Mongolia: The World Bank has been working with the Government of Mongolia to build preschools, create mobile kindergartens for the country’s vast rural areas, and provide books and toys to boost kids’ learning. The project, which has already benefited some 8,500 of the country’s most remote children, also includes an innovative home-based program that targets nomadic parents and teaches them to engage with their children and play the role of preschool teacher several hours a week. Results are promising: participating children significantly outperformed comparable children enrolled in publicly-provided alternative early childhood programs.

Peru: In 2007, 28.5 percent of Peruvian 0-5 year old children suffered from chronic malnutrition. With support from the World Bank and other donors, Peru strengthened its conditional cash transfers and the supply of health and nutrition services to target low-income families with young children. In just seven years, the country cut its chronic malnutrition rate in half, to 14 percent. This ranks among the most successful achievements in improving child nutrition in the world and underscores the ability to achieve dramatic and relatively quick improvements in child malnutrition.

Last Updated: Apr 05, 2024

The World Bank works with many partners to improve children’s development around the world.

Through the Early Learning Partnership (ELP), the World Bank is working with a range of bilateral partners and foundation partners to scale-up access to quality early childhood interventions and improve outcomes for young children. Since 2012, ELP has committed over $32.6 million to close to 200 grants in 81 countries. These grants have generated more than $3.7 billion in new and improved finance to support ECD through development finance and have reached at least 28.4 million children and 25.7 million parents.

The World Bank launched the Early Years Fellowship in 2017, a two-year fellowship for promising young professionals who bring passion and expertise to ensure that kids get a good start in life. The Fellows work closely with WORLD BANK teams to support their country’s government to promote ECD. Since 2017, two cohorts of 45 Fellows have graduated with a third under way. The fellows – doctors, nurses, teachers, economists, public health experts, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and others – are part of a larger capacity-building effort to reduce countries’ reliance on technical assistance from abroad.

In 2021, the World Bank launched the Engaging Policymakers in Early Childhood Program, a multi-year effort to engage with a group of countries to strengthen policymaker capacity, promote South-South learning and generate positive peer pressure to yield more and better ECE investments at the country level. The program’s first cohort graduated in November 2022 with over 100 policymakers and World Bank staff from 15 countries across five regions. While country delegations included high-level ministry officials, the primary audience of the program are the technical staff or managers responsible for ECE who are engaged in the day-to-day issues of early learning, including directors of Pre-primary Education, heads of teacher training institutes, directors of curriculum, and technical officers responsible for ECE.

Through the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), an initiative funded by the UK’s FCDO and CIFF, the World Bank also supports robust early childhood education impact evaluations in dozens of countries across the world. This work has significantly contributed to the expansion of knowledge on the impact of early childhood development interventions in several countries such as Indonesia, Mozambique, Jamaica, and Cambodia. The results of these evaluations have stimulated policy dialogue and informed the design of new projects.

The World Bank engages regularly with the broader development community, including the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), which works to address the needs of the poorest and most disadvantaged children, particularly girls, ethno-linguistic minorities, children with disabilities, and children in fragile and conflict-affected states; Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN), a global movement of 59 countries, dozens of global partners, and more than 3,000 civil society organizations that works on nutrition for young children; as well as the Global Financing Facility (GFF) for the Every Woman Every Child Initiative, a multi-stakeholder partnership that supports country-led efforts to improve the health of women, children, and adolescents. The World Bank is a member of The Early Childhood Development Action Network (ECDAN), a global network committed to the proposition that all young children, regardless of their circumstances, should achieve their developmental potential.

The World Bank also engages with UNESCO, WHO, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Institute of Medicine, bilateral donor agencies, foundations, and international non-governmental organizations, to further the early childhood development agenda.

Last Updated: Apr 05, 2024