Care for child development: improving the care of young children

Overview

Early childhood development (ECD) – including the sensori-motor, social /emotional and language /cognitive capacities – is indivisible from the child survival, health and education agendas and represents one of the important stages for breaking the intergenerational cycles of poverty and for promoting sustainable development. Development during the early years lays the critical foundations for health, learning and behaviour across the life course. Poor development during childhood, unfortunately, is widespread.

Globally over 200 million children do not reach their developmental potential in the first 5 years because they live in poverty, and have poor health services, nutrition and psycho-social care. These disadvantaged children do poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, high criminality, and provide poor care for their own children. As a result, their countries suffer an estimated 20 per cent loss in adult productivity (McGregor et al., The Lancet Child Development Series, 2007). Investment in early childhood programmes is essential because ECD programmes and interventions can provide a “fair start” to children and help to modify distressing socio-economic and gender-related inequities. There is strong evidence regarding interventions that can address the causal factors and reduce the burden of poor child development.

The health sector in countries has the capacity to play a unique role in the field of ECD because the most important window of opportunity for ensuring optimal development and preventing risk of long-term damage is from pregnancy through the first five years of life. Therefore health care encounters for women and young children are important opportunities to help strengthen families’ efforts to promote children’s early development and may represent the only real chance for health professionals in developing countries to positively influence parents of young children. But between birth and five years of life, there are relatively few investments made by governments for promoting the development of young children, and ECD is currently not systematically incorporated into initiatives to promote and protect maternal and child health. Moreover, families are often not prepared or aware of the critical role they can play in promoting cognitive and socio-emotional development in the early years.

To address this gap, WHO and UNICEF have collaborated closely to strengthen their technical support to regions and countries and have extended partnership to national leaders and governments, development agencies, researchers, academics, non-governmental organizations, professional associations and advocacy groups. We have also developed the present evidencebased set of materials to help international staff, national governments and their partners promote Care for Child Development within all relevant programme activities of the health sector.