There was a certain buzz in the Bangkok conference hall in mid-July that comes only when people who have been emailing each other for years finally get together. There are lanyards everywhere. Delegates from seventy-five countries, give or take, exchanged business cards, gave each other hugs despite language barriers, and took out their phones to display pictures of their home children—the ones that this was supposedly all about. From the outside, events such as the OMEP World Assembly seem to be easily disregarded. Another resolution, another conference. However, after a week of sitting inside one, the dismissal begins to feel sluggish.
OMEP is not brand-new. It was established in 1948 with UNESCO’s approval and has been discreetly protecting children’s rights under the age of eight for longer than the majority of education ministries. The theme of the 76th Assembly was “Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together,” a phrase that seems to be overused. In reality, it framed nearly every conversation in the room—sometimes in an awkward way.
Dublin City University’s Mathias Urban gave a keynote address that made no attempt to calm anyone. He discussed forced migration, the long shadow of neoliberalism, the slow erosion of democracy, the climate catastrophe, and how all of these issues eventually fall on the smallest shoulders. He contended that a radical stance of tangible hope is necessary to reclaim the goal of early childhood education. Concrete hope is an odd phrase. I later spoke with a number of delegates in the lobby over weak coffee, and it remained with them.
Even though the term is becoming overused, Sheldon Shaeffer of ARNEC described the current situation as a “polycrisis,” which felt accurate. OMEP’s VP for North America and the Caribbean, Asiya Foster, pushed the discussion toward economic resilience and environmental advocacy, arguing that legislators, educators, families, and communities will need to collaborate—not in the sense of a press release, but in the more difficult, slower, locally embedded sense.
The Tashkent Declaration, a 2022 commitment that most people outside of this world are unaware of, dominated much of the week. The results of the first global report on ECCE, which Rokhaya Fall Dawara from UNESCO presented, were not encouraging. In nations where data are available, about 30% of children are not developing normally. Pre-primary enrollment decreased from 75% in 2020 to 72% in 2023, a minor decline that conceals a more significant issue. The trained-teacher ratio is only 57% in low-income nations. She claimed that in order to achieve universal access for a single year of pre-primary education, six million more teachers would be required by 2030. Part of the issue is that such numbers don’t make headlines.
The Guiding Principles on ECCE Rights, a multistakeholder initiative to unify the disparate legal responsibilities of states across numerous human rights instruments, were the subject of a more subdued session. That group includes the Right to Education Initiative, and as the drafting discussions progressed, it was difficult to ignore how much of global child-rights work still relies on a small group of people who actually know one another.
The significance of OMEP’s Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC goes beyond what the acronym implies. It provides the organization a seat at UNESCO, UNICEF, and the NGOs Committee on Migration, where decisions about the world’s youngest children are made. To be honest, it’s still unclear if that will result in quicker action on the ground. If there were child welfare investors, they would most likely hedge their bets. However, the week in Bangkok revealed something that the data does not capture: 75 countries still have enough faith to participate. That is worth something. Perhaps insufficient. However, something.
