There is a certain type of conference that, although it never makes the evening news, manages to continue influencing policy decades after the cameras would have left, had any cameras been present at all. That’s precisely what OMEP’s World Conference is. It began in Prague in 1948, when Europe was still rebuilding itself. Since then, it has met in secret every three years, traveling to Mexico City, Tokyo, Warsaw, and any other host city that is willing to host it.
It’s a stretch and a bit tongue-in-cheek to compare it to Davos. For a panel discussion on preschool curricula, no one is arriving in private aircraft. However, OMEP operates in a way that is truly Davos-like: it is a recurring, invitation-shaped gathering place where individuals who actually set policy, such as UNESCO officials, education ministers, university researchers, and child-rights attorneys, show up year after year, recognize one another, and continue conducting business across borders that would otherwise remain closed. Taking care of young children makes it a small world, and as a result, its institutional reach has grown significantly.
Because it clarifies many of the reasons why the organization still has moral significance, the origin story is worth pondering. Together with colleagues in France, Denmark, and Norway, Lady Allen of Hurtwood in Britain and Alva Myrdal in Sweden proposed the idea of an international organization dedicated to early childhood education to UNESCO in 1946. Almost immediately, UNESCO said “yes.” Myrdal was chosen as OMEP’s first World President when representatives from nineteen nations on five continents convened in Prague two years later. It’s difficult to ignore the timing: a continent that is still counting its dead decides to unite around the welfare of its youngest survivors. That decision has held up well over time.
Nearly eight decades of unglamorous perseverance ensued. The list of assemblies in Copenhagen, Athens, Caracas, Lagos, Shanghai, Cork, and other places is almost unbelievably long, but each location added a national committee, a group of researchers, and a seat at a table next to the UN. OMEP currently operates in over 80 countries and has consultative status with the UN, UNESCO, and ECOSOC. This may sound bureaucratic, but it actually gives OMEP a permanent voice in the rooms where early childhood policy is drafted, long before it reaches a national parliament.
The 78th World Assembly and Conference is scheduled to take place in Poznań, Poland, from July 13 to July 18. The country’s selection seems intentional rather than coincidental. The theme, “When a Child Speaks…” Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights, directly links the event to Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, who argued that children should be treated as human beings rather than as potential citizens decades before a Convention on the Rights of the Child was drafted. Instead of abandoning the children in his orphanage, Korczak died at Treblinka. OMEP is incorporating this memory into the conference through a pre-assembly visit to Treblinka, followed by the planting of trees in what the organizers are referring to as the Korczak Forest—one tree for each national committee.
That’s not how conferences are typically organized. Before the keynote addresses, most professional gatherings don’t ask attendees to plant trees at a death camp. It seems that OMEP views its own conferences more as rituals than as opportunities for networking, which could be the reason the organization has outlasted so many more ostentatious competitors.
It is still genuinely unclear if Poznań will produce anything as enduring as the 1948 Prague meeting. Every three years, declarations are made at these events, and the majority of them quietly disappear into PDF archives. However, the current trend indicates otherwise: Poznań’s shift toward voice and rights was directly influenced by Bologna’s 2025 emphasis on creativity, with each conference building on the previous one like sediment. Every January, Davos rearranges its agenda to focus on the most pressing issue. OMEP relentlessly keeps going back to the same child.
