Kids: highest return on investment

by Aimee Verdisco

The earliest years of life are critical. They shape the architect of the brain and create the foundation upon which future learning, behavior and health depend. Whether this foundation is resilient or fragile has a long-lasting impact on how a child grows and what she or he achieves as a productive adult.

Striking disparities in what children know and can do are evident well before they enter school, and these disparities are predictive of subsequent academic performance and life achievement. Children from poor families disproportionately enter primary school less ready to learn – for example, with cognitive abilities and vocabularies far below the learning levels of children from families with higher incomes. These children achieve less in school, repeat more, and eventually drop out. As adults, they earn lower wages and have higher rates of delinquency and crime.

The best hope for mitigating such disparities is intervening before children enter primary school. Early childhood development (ECD) and readiness to learn refer to integrated and cross-sector interventions that include education, health and nutrition targeted towards children aged 0-6, their families and communities. Research has shown that with appropriate and quality interventions, children born into poverty today have a better chance of escaping poverty and of being able to raise children who will also elude poverty and reach their full potential in adulthood.

Investing in quality ECD programs yields high rates of return, with gains sustained over time. Data from High Scope Perry (United States) indicate that returns can be as high as $17 for every $1 invested. These returns are both to the child, who as an adult earns higher wages, and to society as a whole, which sees significant savings in welfare, in education due to less need for special education classes, and in crime. In this case, savings in crime costs alone were over 11 times the cost of the program.

Preliminary estimates see a significant gap in coverage: 46 million children aged 0-6 in Latin America and the Caribbean not enrolled in any type of ECD or readiness to learn program. The large majority of these children is poor and runs the risk of not reaching their potential in cognitive development due to poverty, poor health and nutrition, and deficient care. Reducing the gap in coverage of quality ECD and readiness to learn programs requires innovation in service delivery, coordination between and articulation with diverse interests and ministries, and the creation and implementation of mechanisms to ensure quality.

ECD and readiness to learn across the Region remains underfinanced. The estimated financing needs for closing the gap in coverage for the 0-6 cohort is significant: an estimated US$14 billion a year. The magnitude of this gap highlights a number of challenges for the Region.

Are our kids ready to learn?

Among the most persistent knowledge and policy gaps is the lack of comparable indicators on readiness to learn. Readiness to learn is about basic minimum competencies and conditions that enable a child to be successful in school. This minimal package is attainable by all children, regardless of socioeconomic status or other factor. It includes competencies and conditions that cover the major domains of child development (e.g., physical health and well-being; social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication and general knowledge) and sets the bar for what children should know and be able to do at school entry. The goal of defining school readiness via concrete and measurable indicators is to ensure that all children have opportunities to learn and develop the necessary skills and abilities by the time they enter school.

Yet the metrics commonly used to measure child development or school readiness (e.g., rates of infant mortality, enrollment rates in preschool) are blunt, in that they do not capture the complexity of child development and thus offer a sub-optimal foundation for dimensioning and targeting initiatives that ensure all children have opportunities to develop the skills and competencies required for success in school prior to entering first grade. Nor do existing metrics capture age-related differences. ECD and readiness to learn entail continuous processes of development. A child of two years cannot be expected to master the same skills and competencies as a child of six years.

The Bank is working together with governments across the Region to start closing these gaps. Through a grant from the Regional Technical Cooperation facility, the Bank is launching an organization- and region-wide readiness to learn initiative to generate cross-national, psychometrically robust indicators and data on child development outcomes for the entire ECD/readiness to learn period (0-6 years). The generation of these data is expected to provide governments with a solid basis both for monitoring their respective national plans and policies and for decision making at all points in the policy process. In addition, it is hoped that these efforts will lead to a platform for debate in much the same way as other regional comparisons have (e.g., the Latin America Laboratory of Education Quality and its successor, the Second Round of Education Quality). These experiences have brought governments together and focused their attention on the factors surrounding differences in results across the Region and, building on such information, to more effectively target and implement policies that benefit all children.

An integrated response

ECD and readiness to learn are Bank-wide priorities. Current investments run the gamut of preschool, early stimulation, nutrition and child maternal health and total more than US$1 billion; another US$218 million are in the pipeline. On the analytical side, the Bank is investing about US$4.6 million in the generation of cutting-edge research to help inform its portfolio of ECD and readiness to learn interventions.

This priority is necessarily reflected at the country level. A number of countries are in the process of elaborating national plans for ECD and taking promising initiatives to scale, many of which have emerged from municipalities or other local-level governments and non-governmental organizations dedicated to ECD. In addition, there is a growing realization of the fact that responsibilities for ensuring that the developmental needs of young children are met are shared across society, and that sustaining the impact of quality programs requires interventions articulated with primary schools, families and communities.

Selected Bibliography
 

* Aimee Verdisco is a specialist in the Education Division at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)

(1) This article is based heavily on a long line of research on the effectiveness of ECD. Key articles can be found in the bibliography.

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