Imagine a conference room in Bangkok during the summer of 2024, complete with ceiling fans, long tables, and almost 400 academics, researchers, and policymakers who have come from all over the world with the somewhat stubborn belief that most governments spend the least amount of money on the most important years of a person’s life. There was something about the discussions at the 76th World Assembly of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) that felt less like scholarly discourse and more like a group of people’s frustrations finding a formal outlet.
OMEP is not a brand-new company. It was established in 1948, the same year as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and has spent the majority of the modern era working in more than 60 countries to protect young children’s rights and encourage governments to view pre-primary education as more of a necessity than a luxury. Though it’s unclear if this speaks more to the complexity of the issue or the governments’ obstinacy, the fact that it still has to make the same arguments in 2024 says something.
Bangkok’s numbers were startling. In nations where data are available, about 30% of children are not developing normally. In fact, pre-primary enrollment decreased from 75% to 72% between 2020 and 2023 for at least a year of structured education prior to the start of primary school. Just 57% of early childhood educators in low-income nations have formal training. Researchers estimate that the world needs at least six million more qualified early childhood educators by 2030 in order to close the gap. Six million. That is a structural failure disguised as a policy, not a rounding error.
In essence, what OMEP is requesting is a reordering of priorities that is politically awkward for the majority of governments. The group contends that pre-primary education should receive at least 10% of national education budgets; practically no nation currently meets this requirement, which necessitates battling for shelf space against secondary school infrastructure, university funding, and the politically visible categories of spending that win elections. Ribbon-cutting events are uncommon in early childhood programs. Twenty years later, workforce productivity data and healthcare cost reductions demonstrate the benefits—exactly the kind of return that doesn’t neatly fit into a four-year political cycle.
Observing OMEP advance this agenda gives the impression that the group is both correct and consistently ahead of political will. Children from the Nagasaki region of Japan folded origami cranes as part of peace education programs, and migrant children in Cyprus painted rights-themed artwork with a startling, unforced clarity. The Bangkok conference produced striking examples of what effective early education looks like in practice. These interventions are not abstract. Developmental science consistently demonstrates that this window of opportunity is the most consequential for young children.
The more significant obstacle that OMEP continues to face is that it is more difficult to make the case for quality rather than just access than it is for expanding the number of classrooms. In Latin America, governments spend over three dollars on children aged six to eleven for every dollar spent on a child under five. In certain locations, the infrastructure is present, but the interactions within it—the stimulation, the responsiveness, and the real level of engagement between adults and young children—frequently fall short of expectations. Constructing a daycare facility is observable and quantifiable. It is neither to teach a caregiver how to truly relate to a two-year-old. One of the more obvious conflicts in global development at the moment is the discrepancy between what is funded and what actually works.
OMEP’s efforts to establish early childhood education as a legally protected human right under international law, which were most recently advanced in Geneva in late 2025, may be the catalyst that ultimately alters the political landscape. When moral arguments were insufficient, legal accountability has advanced other issues. For the better part of eight decades, OMEP has been asking, in various forms, whether governments will accept that obligation or continue to treat it as an aspirational footnote. At the very least, it has never been more difficult to argue against the urgency.
