There is something quietly unsettling about sitting in a conference hall in Bangkok listening to early childhood experts describe the state of the world. Not because what they are saying is radical — but because it isn’t. It’s logical, careful, evidence-based. And somehow, most governments still aren’t listening.
In July 2024, the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education, known as OMEP, held its 76th World Assembly and International Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Nearly 400 participants from across the globe gathered under one theme: Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together. The message running beneath every keynote, every symposium, every country presentation was consistent and difficult to dismiss. What happens to a child before the age of eight doesn’t just shape that child. It shapes the societies those children will eventually build — or break.
OMEP, founded in 1948 and operating in more than 60 countries, has long advocated for the rights of young children. But the Bangkok gathering felt different in tone. There was urgency in the room that went beyond the usual conference energy. Mathias Urban, Director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at Dublin City University, named the current moment plainly — climate catastrophe, forced migration, erosion of democracy, the consequences of unchecked global capitalism — and argued that early childhood education must be reclaimed from a position of what he called “concrete hope.” Not optimism as a performance, but hope as an active, collective project.
Sheldon Shaeffer, Chair of the Board of Directors at the Asia Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood, introduced a term that seemed to resonate with everyone in the room: “polycrisis.” It’s the idea that multiple, overlapping crises are hitting simultaneously, compounding each other in ways no single policy can address. His point was that early childhood educators and systems must help young children not simply cope with this reality but understand it — and eventually respond to it. That’s a significant demand to make of a four-year-old’s curriculum. But the argument is that if you wait until adolescence, the foundational values — empathy, cooperation, civic responsibility — are already set.
The data presented at the conference made the urgency harder to brush aside. Rokhaya Fall Dawara, the ECCE Lead at UNESCO headquarters, shared findings from the first-ever Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education. In countries where data exists, roughly 30 percent of children are not developmentally on track. Enrollment in organized pre-primary learning dropped from 75 percent in 2020 to 72 percent in 2023 — a quiet but telling reversal. In low-income countries, only 57 percent of early childhood teachers are trained. These aren’t abstract statistics. They represent millions of children entering primary school already behind, carrying disadvantages that compound year after year.
There’s a sense, watching this unfold, that the world has convinced itself that early childhood is a soft policy issue. Something nice to fund when budgets allow. OMEP’s position — and increasingly the position of UNESCO, UNICEF, and allied organizations — is that this framing is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Peace education woven into early childhood programs in Japan, Cyprus, Kenya, and Thailand showed what’s possible when governments treat the early years as foundational rather than supplementary. Children in Cyprus painted their rights on paper. Children in Nagasaki folded origami cranes. These aren’t decorative gestures. They are, according to the practitioners presenting them, the beginning of a democratic instinct.
It’s still unclear whether governments will move fast enough. The Tashkent Declaration has outlined commitments; the gap between commitment and funding remains wide. OMEP’s president, Mercedes Mayol Lassalle, put it plainly — transformation in early childhood education is not just about more services or better infrastructure. It’s about building a culture that actually values the earliest years of life.
That culture doesn’t yet exist at the policy level in most countries. But in Bangkok, in July, among educators and researchers who have spent careers watching what the first eight years can do — there was no doubt about what’s at stake.
