"Business Champions" invited to The Hague
To be held in The Hague on April 22nd and 23rd, Business Champions for Early Child Development - Building a Healthy and Educated Workforce in Emerging Markets (pdf) is the first event in a new initiative, co-organised with the Committee for Economic Development and the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution, which seeks to bring the importance of early child development to the forefront of international economic debates.
The Washington-based Committee for Economic Development (CED) is a business think tank dedicated to policy research on major economic and social issues and its implementation by the public and private sectors. It helped shape the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and has been involved in engaging American business and political leaders in public support for early education for the last two decades.
The Wolfensohn Center for Development, founded by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn in July 2006, is committed to improving the scalability and sustainability of effective poverty reduction strategies in developing countries.
Together, we are taking up the important challenge of Early Child Development by focusing on the process by which effective programs, policies and interventions aimed at improving the nutrition, psycho-social development, health, and education of young children in developing countries can be successfully scaled-up and sustained.
The initiative aims at bringing together key stakeholders at both the country specific and global level of Early Child Development with the goal of improving individual country performance of, and global commitment to, the development of young children.
As part of our outreach on global Early Child Development, we are organising a series of high-level business leader roundtables to discuss modalities for increased support of such programs and policies. The conference on Business Champions for Early Child Development - Building a Healthy and Educated Workforce in Emerging Markets (pdf) is the first in a series that will see follow-up events in Washington and Cape Town.
It is thus an important platform from which to launch a global call to action for support of Early Child Development from the global business community. Learning from CED's domestic success with early childhood education programs, we are building an international partnership to bring the importance of Early Child Development to the forefront of international economic debates.
We believe that business leaders who publicly support Early Child Development have an opportunity to be key stakeholders for economic growth in emerging markets. This project seeks to build a business constituency for reform that can support developing countries in growing Early Child Development programs toward a healthy citizenry and vibrant economy.
16 April 2008
