A child’s success is largely predetermined by the time they enter a primary school classroom. That’s not pessimism; rather, it’s what decades of research on child development have consistently told us, and it’s now impossible to ignore the most recent global findings on early childhood care and education. Through the eyes of organizations that monitor early childhood development globally, the picture appears to be mixed: a few nations are quietly doing this well, while one very large and wealthy country appears to be structurally incapable of doing so.
The first-ever Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education from UNESCO and UNICEF received the kind of attention that is often overshadowed by more immediately dramatic headlines. However, the information within merits consideration. In low-income nations, almost 60% of children do not have access to early care and educational opportunities. Lower-income countries would need to add at least six million teachers and close an annual funding gap of about $21 billion in order to meet the goal of at least one year of organized learning prior to primary school by 2030. The report states unequivocally that the world is not on course.
However, it’s noteworthy that some nations are on course. Not all of them are the ones you would anticipate.
The countries that are frequently mentioned in early childhood policy circles—Estonia, Sweden, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Rwanda—do not share a GDP or a continent. What they have in common is a political choice to treat early childhood education as infrastructure rather than charity, which was made years or even decades ago. Early education was a key component of Estonia’s digital-first national identity. Since the 1970s, Sweden has provided universal, subsidized childcare.
Policymakers around the world have studied New Zealand’s Te Whāriki curriculum, which was created in collaboration with indigenous Māori communities. A national early childhood system that covers infants from birth was implemented in Uruguay. Additionally, Rwanda, which is still recovering from the trauma of 1994, has quietly surprised outside observers by making early childhood development a key component of its long-term national planning.
These nations are not geographically or economically similar. Their political will is similar. When you look westward, that may sound like a platitude, but it really captures the essence of the issue.
Compared to most countries in the world, the United States spends more per person on nearly everything. However, for millions of families, the country’s early childhood education system continues to be a patchwork of pricey private daycare, persistently underfunded Head Start programs, and policy discussions that seem to go around in circles without coming to a conclusion. In American cities, childcare expenses can surpass college tuition. The availability of preschool varies greatly by zip code. Among the lowest-paid professionals in the nation, educators perform some of the most developmentally critical work.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore. A nation capable of funding the most costly military in human history has failed to ensure that every child receives a first-rate early education for even one year. At its core, that isn’t a funding issue. It’s an urgent issue.
It is anticipated that the OMEP World Assembly meeting in Poznań, Poland in July 2026 will intensify efforts to close these gaps, building on the momentum from the Tashkent Declaration commitments that governments signed in 2022 but are, for the most part, still far from fulfilling. OMEP has long maintained that the right to education should start with the youngest children, not at age five or six, when some developmental windows have already closed.
In one version of 2030, the SDG Target 4.2 commitments appear to be just another set of promises made in conference rooms. There is also a version in which the nations that discovered this—quietly, consciously, and without much fanfare—become the role model that the rest of the world eventually adopts. In certain areas, the difference between those two futures is already narrowing. It hasn’t even opened in others.
