Decisions regarding the world’s youngest children are quietly made in a conference room somewhere in New York, most likely in one of those beige UN hallways where the lighting is consistently a little flat and the coffee is mediocre. Not the decisions that made headlines. Not the ones that are featured on the home page. The ones below, where positions are staked out, frameworks are written, and language is shaped before most people even realize a conversation is taking place. OMEP has spent a lot of time in that room.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education was established in Prague in 1948 during the same postwar period that gave the world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNESCO, and a shared resolve to avoid making the same disastrous mistakes twice. Delegates from seventeen nations attended the inaugural conference. The concept was fairly straightforward, if not straightforward: children should receive an education that respects their complete humanity from birth to age eight. Over the next seven and a half decades, OMEP has developed something far more sophisticated around that concept.
With five regional bodies and a network of national committees overseeing local advocacy, teacher training, research, and policy engagement, the organization currently operates in almost 80 countries. The United Nations Economic and Social Council has granted it Special Consultative Status, a title that is not given lightly. Organizations with proven credibility, accountability systems, and work that truly supports UN objectives are awarded it by ECOSOC. This status, which is a kind of quiet credential in and of itself, has been held by OMEP since its founding year.
But OMEP’s longevity isn’t the only thing that sets it apart. It’s the variety of tables it occupies at once. The organization contributes to strategy documents and international frameworks while acting as a technical advisor on early childhood care and education at UNESCO. It is a chosen participant in the Collective Consultation of NGOs on Education 2030 Coordination Group. The World President of OMEP held that position directly in 2020 and 2021. The UN NGOs Committee on Migration, which OMEP chaired for four years, may seem unrelated to early childhood work, but keep in mind that millions of the world’s most vulnerable young children are migrants or displaced people. When you look at it, the connection is clear.
Additionally, OMEP has been working on the Education for Sustainable Development project since 2008. It’s not an abstract method. It entails preparing educators in actual classrooms in various nations to incorporate civic and environmental awareness into early learning as a way of thinking rather than as an add-on to the curriculum. Courses, seminars, yearly awards, and the kind of slow, methodical knowledge-building that doesn’t result in press releases but gradually changes practice are all part of this.
The UNESCO Participation Programme initiative in Africa, which was started in 2017 and focuses on water, women, and hydrology training, is one noteworthy program. It grew from three nations to nine by 2019. The way OMEP typically operates is characterized by this type of regional growth, which is real, incremental, and unglamorous. The organization may not be well-known outside of early education circles for precisely this reason. Dramatic announcements are not appropriate for the work.
Observing the operations of organizations such as OMEP gives one the impression that the most important work in international policy occurs at a frequency that most people are unaware of. The early years of a child’s life—cognitive development, emotional control, language acquisition, and basic trust in the world—are shaped by the conditions that governments set and that organizations like OMEP push governments to correct. In 1948, that work began in Prague. It is still ongoing.
