#Investinpeople was a prominent theme of the annual World Bank and International Monetary Fund Spring Meeting held last week. Central to this was a call by Bill Gates, Jim Kim, President of the World Bank and Penny Mordaunt, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development for ‘investing in people—through education, health, nutrition, social protection and jobs’.

As much evidence shows, investing in people requires interventions to start from the early years. Investing in children’s early years requires a joined-up approach across health, nutrition, education, water and sanitation, social protection and play. However, our new research published by children’s charity Theirworld reveals that donor aid for the early years is uneven.

Most aid for the early years go to health and nutrition

We find that, while aid to early childhood development has been increasing in recent times, this is largely driven by increases in investments in health and nutrition.

Meanwhile aid budgets almost completely ignore education for young children – we find that just 1% of aid for children under five goes to education, on average, and that this has been largely stagnant.

One of the explanations for the increases in health and nutrition is that powerful global campaigns do work. Recent high-profile global initiatives in health and nutrition have influenced donor governments and this is something to recognize and support.

Successful global health campaigns steered funding

In the lead up to 2015, a number of global initiatives were put in place with the aim of reducing under-five mortality and malnutrition. These were areas that were previously “off track” and we have seen remarkable results.

The initiatives on nutrition also arose at the same time as the global financial and food crises, which saw a steep rise in food prices and sparked global concern for the world’s poorest populations. In campaigning terms, this answered the toughest of questions, which is “why now?”.

This focus brought in to place an influential five-part Lancet series on undernutrition in child development. The Canadian Prime Minister hosted the G8 summit where donors pledged commitment to the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH), which included a commitment to increasing international finance to this area.

The Scaling Up Nutrition initiative was launched in 2010 and is still active, and in 2017 the UK Government and World Bank co-hosted a major global event called ‘Spotlight on Nutrition’. International organizations, such as Save the Children, prioritized major global campaigns to tackle preventable child deaths.

All this attention has resulted in the health and nutrition sectors of early childhood development receiving national and international attention - including more funding. Such attention and funding is much needed. However, early years’ education has been conspicuous by its absence both in terms of global attention and financial support.

International organizations must do more

Even the World Bank, which is a lead advocate for early childhood education, only spent around 9% of its ECD funding on education in 2016, according to our analysis of data reported to OECD Creditor Reporting System (OECD-CRS).

And UNICEF, another multilateral agency renowned for its work in the early years, spent less than 1% of its early childhood funding on education in the same year. More generally, of the 93 bilateral and multilateral donors reporting to OECD-CRS, just over a quarter disbursed any ODA to pre-primary education in 2016.

While the Global Partnership for Education does not report to the OECD-CRS directly, it appears to be a relatively significant donor to pre-primary education compared with other donors with respect to the share of its total ODA to pre-primary education:

of around US$4.5 billion in total GPE funding since 2002, 4% was for pre-primary education — equivalent to approximately US$180 million.

Comparing this to the amount each of the top 25 donors disbursed in total to pre-primary education over 2002-2016 this ranks GPE as the second largest donor in volume terms after the World Bank over this period. However, as a fund that is purely for education, GPE could do more to prioritize its budget towards early childhood education, particularly given the huge gap in funding that is needed to reach those who are at most risk of being left behind.

Getting to a more balanced investment in early childhood

We might be starting to see the green shoots of change. The Sustainable Development Goals include an explicit target on early childhood education. And some international donor governments are looking closely at how they spend their education budgets.

Last year, G20 leaders agreed to establish an International Finance Facility for Education and the preparatory work is under way. A focus on pre-primary needs to be central to the discussions on how to prioritize the increased funding that is expected to be available through this mechanism.

It is now time to take a good look at the numbers and commit to urgent action.  We hope 2018 will be the year where we start to bring investment in pre-primary education up alongside health and nutrition to achieve a more balanced investment in early childhood development. If not, millions of children will continue to fail to reach their full potential.