In July, Bangkok is unrelentingly humid. The kind of heat that, despite the dryness of the agenda items, makes conference rooms feel urgent. However, during the third week of that month in 2024, a declaration urging the UN to devote a full decade to early childhood care and education was signed inside the halls of the 76th OMEP World Assembly. This statement deserves more attention than it has received. The majority of readers may not be familiar with it. The declaration aims to address a portion of the issue, including that gap.
Since its founding in 1948, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, has quietly worked in over 60 countries to protect young children’s rights in areas that hardly ever make headlines. Its most ambitious recent action is the Bangkok Declaration, which was formally adopted on July 16, 2024. It is a structured call to action that calls on governments, the UN system, UNESCO, and civil society to treat early childhood as a central, urgent, well-funded global priority rather than as a policy footnote. The ten goals of the declaration read more like a silent acknowledgement of how far the world has fallen behind than as bureaucratic aspirations.
The conference’s numbers were sobering in the same way that statistics can be when you finally take the time to read them. Pre-primary enrollment actually decreased from 75% in 2020 to 72% in 2023 for a year of structured education prior to primary school. regressing at a time when international commitments to education were purportedly increasing. Only 57% of early childhood educators in low-income nations possess the necessary training, and hiring at least 6 million more teachers would be necessary to achieve universal enrollment for even one year of pre-primary by 2030. There isn’t a funding gap there. That has been quietly developing for years and is a structural failure.
The Bangkok Declaration seems to be one of those documents that is significant not because of what it says but rather because of what it sets off. A helpful analogy is the 1990 Jomtien Declaration on Education for All, which provided the international education community with a common language and a point of pressure even though it didn’t resolve any issues on its own. By connecting to the earlier Tashkent Declaration’s commitments, anchoring itself to Sustainable Development Goal target 4.2, and advocating for a dedicated UN decade that would compel early childhood onto national agendas in a manner that voluntary frameworks just don’t, the Bangkok Declaration is obviously attempting something similar.
Beyond the declaration itself, the breadth of issues that the nearly 400 participants decided to address was what set the Bangkok assembly apart. A concern for children’s rights is climate change. AI’s gradual impact on early childhood education. Preschool curricula incorporate peace education; at a symposium on the topic, children from Nagasaki folded origami cranes while migrant children in Cyprus painted what they saw as peace. These are not insignificant additions to an agenda for education. They acknowledge that early childhood does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is a part of the world that children are born into—a world that, in the words of one keynote speaker, is going through a true “polycrisis.”
The Bangkok Declaration’s main goal of establishing a formal UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education is still up for debate. Despite their commitment, the declaration’s signatories have little institutional clout compared to what a Security Council resolution or a General Assembly mandate would offer, and the machinery of international consensus moves slowly. However, it is difficult not to admire the ambition of this endeavor as it develops. In essence, the declaration makes the case that early childhood should be viewed as infrastructure rather than a charitable endeavor. Whether Bangkok was a turning point or just another well-meaning conference room in a scorching July will depend on whether governments are willing to fund it that way.
