Policy brief. GPE’s work for early childhood care and education

Highlights 

• Delivering quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) is one of the most critical and cost-effective investments a country can make.
• For the first time, the Sustainable Development Goals include a target for ECCE (SDG 4.2) to ensure that children have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education.
• Despite progress in pre-primary enrollment in many countries, worldwide there are still more than 150 million children ages 3-5 who do not have access to pre-primary education.
• GPE has invested about US$180 million in more than 30 partner developing countries to support ECCE.
• Through GPE financing, countries improve ECCE by developing policy guidelines and service standards; training pre-primary teachers and facilitators; building and rehabilitating classrooms; establishing early learning assessment systems; distributing learning materials; supporting parent education and community-based early learning programs; and delivering communications campaigns to improve awareness of the benefits of ECCE.