In most stories about city reform, there’s a point where the one person who made it all happen emerges. This could be a charismatic mayor, a visionary minister, or a well-funded NGO. The story of how Addis Ababa changed how it helps young children grow and learn isn’t quite that simple. It began with two learning trips, which were a bit of a surprise. When top city officials returned from trips to Denmark and Brazil, they brought back something harder to measure than a policy memo: a real change in how they thought about what a city owed its youngest residents.
It was around 2019. Since then, Addis Ababa has been rebuilding how it helps kids from birth to age eight in a way that can only be described as slow, deliberate, and not very exciting. The city planned to help 330,000 families who are struggling and 1.3 million kids in a variety of ways, including with nutrition, health, play-based learning, coaching for caregivers, child care, and green space. That is not a test run. That’s a commitment to the structure.
The model works across systems at the same time, which is why this is important to pay attention to, especially for cities in the United States. Most cities in the U.S. tend to treat early childhood separately. Head Start is going on over there, public pre-K is being talked about over there, and kids’ health is being talked about somewhere else. It was more planned in Addis Ababa, where they made a multisectoral framework that looks at the first 1,000 days of a child’s life as a single policy window. Nutrition, responsive caregiving, and health outcomes are all taken care of at the same time, not by separate bureaucracies.
More than 5,000 new jobs were made available for women to work as parenting coaches who visit families in need. More than 18,000 teachers were trained in how to use play-based learning in pre-primary classrooms. A lot of people who work in day cares got the same kind of training. These are not symbolic actions. They show that there is a real work force built around young children, and they also show that women can make money. The fact that the money is used to both help kids and support the women who work with them might be one of the most undervalued design choices in the whole project.
Mayor Adanech Abiebie has said that she wants to make Addis Ababa the best place in Africa to raise a child and be a mother. It’s easy to think that kind of political commitment is just words. But it seems like this kind of cross-agency work doesn’t last through budget cycles or changes in administration without support from the top. Anyone who has seen a good city project die quietly when a new government takes over knows what that looks like.
Cities in the U.S. have a lot of ideas for young children. A lot of the time, they lack long-term political will and unified implementation. All three cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston—have plans, programs, and a lot of good data. Coherence is something that Addis Ababa has worked hard to find: a framework that connects pre-primary education to mothers working, to green spaces in communities, and to health visits for kids. The pieces are in cities in the United States. They’re just not always put together the same way.
We still don’t know a lot about what will happen in Addis Ababa in the long run. A seven-year journey is important, but it’s too early to say what effect it will have on future generations. That being said, the city has shown that early childhood can become a real municipal priority in a low-income urban setting, even though resources are limited. That’s not nothing. It might be helpful for cities that still think of early childhood as a charity project to think about that for a moment.
