Some types of leadership don’t make themselves known very loudly. It’s seen in changed policy language, rooms where kids’ rights finally have a seat at the table, and international frameworks that now have words like “early childhood” where they didn’t have them before. That’s the kind of leadership Mercedes Mayol Lassalle brought to OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. It’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t go away when someone changes their title.
Depending on who you ask, her leaving office marks the end of a chapter that was either too short or just long enough. In either case, you can see the mark.
Mayol Lassalle came to the job with experience from working in Latin America, a place where issues of early childhood development have been linked to larger fights over poverty, inequality between men and women, and access to basic services for a long time. It’s hard not to notice how her priorities in the world were affected by her location. It may have been more natural for her to understand than most that a child’s first few years don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in families, communities, and economies where women are undersized. Most of the people living in extreme poverty around the world are women and girls. In many places with early childhood programs, they are also the main caregivers, the first teachers, and the ones who get help the least.
She led OMEP so that its advocacy leaned into these intersections instead of avoiding them while she was president. That’s not a little thing. International groups usually use careful, consensus-building language when they talk. As it turned out, Mayol Lassalle wasn’t so much interested in comfort as she was in clarity—in moving the conversation away from surface symptoms and toward underlying causes.
It seems like the time she spent at OMEP happened at the same time as a change in the way people who work in global development think about young children. Slowly but surely, the field has changed from seeing early education as an extra social welfare benefit to seeing it as essential building blocks. It’s really hard to say whether OMEP’s advocacy helped bring about that change or just went along with it. It’s hard to measure these things. But she is responsible for the fight.
Also, she brought a way to connect people from different areas, which may be harder to replace. Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa are just some of the places where OMEP members come from. Sometimes, finding common ground feels like a leap of faith. But Mayol Lassalle seemed to know that early childhood is one area where these differences aren’t so big. The developmental window of a child doesn’t have edges. She used the idea of universality as both a moral argument and a political tool.
The next phase of OMEP’s leadership is still not clear, nor is it clear if the group will continue to push as hard as it has in recent years for gender equality and early childhood rights. Those problems don’t go away when a president leaves office. The data actually shows that they’re getting more important, not less.
An unfinished project is what Mayol Lassalle leaves behind. The bar has been raised. And that might be the kind of legacy that lasts the longest—the kind that makes retreat hard for the next person who comes after.
