When you care about something that no one else seems to care about enough, you get a certain kind of tiredness. Early childhood receives very little attention in rooms where development economists quarrel over GDP projections and education ministers debate budgets. However, a quiet but determined movement has been emerging throughout Africa somewhere in that ongoing gap between what is discussed and what is actually done. At the center of this movement is a woman whose work through OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, is starting to change the way the continent views its youngest citizens.
When observing events like the recent OMEP Africa Regional Conference, it’s difficult to ignore how different the atmosphere is from a typical policy gathering. There aren’t a lot of people showing concern in these rooms. They have a working urgency to them that implies someone has been working for years before the cameras showed up. Speaking at one such event, Rebecca Akufo-Addo urged African countries to treat early childhood education as a matter of true national urgency rather than as a side budget line. That message did not appear out of thin air. It was the result of years of persistent advocacy, most of which took place away from the podiums.
A growing corpus of research, including frameworks like UNESCO’s Indigenous Early Childhood Care and Education curriculum, which was created especially for African contexts, forms the intellectual basis of OMEP Africa’s strategy. The significance of that work lies not only in its content but also in its insistence that African children be understood within their own cultural contexts rather than through Western developmental frameworks that are imported in bulk. There is a perception that early childhood policies on the continent have been implemented here by default for far too long because they were created for children in other countries.
This is the real point of contention. When done correctly, early childhood education is more than just lesson plans for babysitting. It is the time when fundamental values, social comprehension, and cognitive structures are being put together, roughly from birth to age eight. Many of the most fundamental values of tomorrow’s society are being formed in early childhood contexts today, as the editors of the International Journal of Early Childhood stated clearly in 2009. That observation has held up quite well.
Despite the overwhelming economic argument, the OMEP Africa approach is notable for refusing to treat this as a purely economic argument. Long-term, quantifiable effects of persistent underinvestment in early childhood include poverty cycles, educational attainment, and health outcomes. Beyond the data, however, the advocates behind this work appear to recognize that framing children’s futures solely in terms of return on investment is a symptom of the issue. Kids aren’t assets for a portfolio. Their formative years do not contribute to productivity.
Whether governments in sub-Saharan Africa will act quickly enough to meet the magnitude of the need is still up in the air. There is progress, but it is fragile, isolated, and promising. National ECD frameworks are being developed in a few nations. Others are still caught in cycles of political diversion and inadequate funding. It appears that the women employed by organizations such as OMEP are conscious of this disparity. Nevertheless, they press.
There is a sense that something is changing as this movement grows, albeit imperfectly and in the face of strong institutional opposition. Maybe slowly. But really. The future was always going to be Africa’s children. The question of whether the responsible adults would behave appropriately has always existed, and now someone is making it more difficult to avoid.
