Taking quality early education to scale

There is now a strong global movement for expanding early childhood education and care. This movement is propelled by a robust body of evidence drawn from studies ranging from places as diverse as Egypt, India, Colombia, the United States and Bolivia.

Just in the period 1999-2006, global coverage of pre-primary school has increased 26% – it is up to just over 40% globally among 3-4 year olds – and the number of children out of primary school has been reduced by nearly one-fourth.

The trends are headed in the right direction, and so the problem becomes more specific – what are the roadblocks to making sure the most disadvantaged are not left out?

In many countries, creating models of delivery and design for early learning programs is no longer the main issue. What continues to be at stake, however, is how to scale investments in early learning while maintaining a reasonable level of quality and reaching the disadvantaged.

In a recent study of ‘scale-up’ efforts realized by the Brookings Institute and financed by BvLF, four countries revealed unsatisfactory results – in no case was the lack of funding given as the main reason.

Perhaps more importantly, Education for All reporting in 2009 points to evidence of an inverse relationship between need and provision, which means that even when overall coverage is high, the most disadvantaged are often left out.

To effectively address the challenge of going to scale, we will go beyond the mechanics of an individual model of service delivery or the lack of public financing. We will use our 40 years of experience in a concerted effort to advocate for cost-effective approaches that:

• work for the most disadvantaged
• focus on building sustained demand for services amongst the very poor
• achieve economies of scale, and
• explore funding arrangements that are viable in resource poor environments or situations where public funding is likely to be too weak ‘to go it alone’.