In many respects, it began with a princess and a pandemic. In 2020, HRH Princess Laurentien came forward and urged UNESCO to take action in order to safeguard the world’s youngest children, whose education and care had been quietly collapsing due to COVID-19. At the time, it seemed like a long shot. Budgets were getting smaller, governments were overburdened, and early childhood programs are rarely the most influential. However, something shifted. In order to determine what a serious, coordinated global response might actually entail, UNESCO arranged three high-level meetings that brought together ministry representatives, agency heads, and experts from all over the world. The Global Partnership Strategy for Early Childhood, or GPS, was developed by December 2021.
The GPS isn’t a sentimental statement. It was created in response to something much more difficult to overlook: a real, pervasive deficiency of services for young children, including child protection, health, nutrition, sanitation, and pre-primary education. It’s the kind of gap that shapes entire generations but doesn’t make headlines. Target 4.2 of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which seeks to guarantee that all girls and boys have access to high-quality pre-primary education prior to starting primary school, is formally linked to the strategy. That alignment is important. It makes it more difficult to avoid by linking early childhood care to a commitment that governments have already ratified.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, is at the heart of this endeavor and has become one of the more subtly significant participants in this global movement. To determine what the GPS actually does in practice, OMEP has been collaborating with UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, the WHO, the ILO, the OECD, and a number of regional networks. Although the public rarely pays much attention to this type of coalition building, it is precisely where policy is shaped. Because OMEP works through partnerships rather than making big announcements, there is a perception that the organization’s role is frequently undervalued.
The UNESCO Early Childhood Resource Bank, a database created especially to gather and disseminate research, policy analysis, and useful advice on Education for Sustainable Development for children from birth to age eight, is one of OMEP’s more tangible contributions. With plans to add national policy statements, lesson plans, children’s book lists, and project descriptions that are updated four times a year, the resource bank is still being developed. Members from almost 70 countries have been invited to participate in OMEP’s Working Group. It’s an ambitious project, and it’s still genuinely unclear if it will reach the depth it aims for. Databases like this heavily rely on consistent participation from people who are already overworked.
However, Strategy 5 is what gives the GPS actual weight. The creation of a United Nations Decade for Early Childhood Care, Education, and Development is one of the important proposals made by this component to the UN General Assembly. If that suggestion is implemented, it would result in a systematic, ten-year international commitment with the kind of institutional support that tends to change government behavior, or at least government budgeting. The actual pressure on pre-primary spending would originate from there.
It’s difficult to ignore how long early childhood education has been marginalized and viewed as supplemental rather than fundamental in serious policy discourse. Even though the politics surrounding it are complex, the argument put forth by GPS and OMEP’s work is straightforward: investing in children before the age of five yields returns that no later intervention can completely match. Variations of this have previously been heard by governments. Now, there is a global platform, a coordinating structure, and a group of organizations prepared to continue attending those high-level meetings until something genuinely changes.
