Promoting the scale-up of equitable and quality ECE service provision through adequate resources mobilization and strong advocacy

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In the past two decades, international recognition on the importance of early childhood education has been growing. Research has demonstrated that significant educational, social and economic benefits can result from the provision of quality pre-primary services. These benefits not only impact individual children through school readiness, improved learning and developmental outcomes, but also have the potential to impact society at large (UNESCO 2006; UNICEF 2019).

The inclusion of pre-primary and early childhood development in the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development 2015–2030 is evidence of this increased global attention. Specifically, “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education” is the second target of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on education (UNESCO 2016). All governments party to the SDGs must implement and report on progress toward achieving the target of universal access to quality pre-primary education by 2030.

However, while there has been notable expansion in the provision of ECE globally, as of 2017 only half of all pre-primary age children were enrolled in a pre-primary education program, and in low-income countries, only one in five children had access (UNICEF, 2019). At the current rate of progress, more than half of low- and lower-middle-income countries will not achieve the target of universal access to quality pre-primary education by 2030.

Weak ECE financial planning has been widely recognized as one of the areas of ECD policy planning in most need of improvement. Indeed, investments in ECE remain low, especially in countries/regions that would benefit the most. In many LICs, the share of education public expenditures going to pre-primary education is close to 2% (UNICEF, 2019), in par with aid financing, with only 2% of the aid to basic education going to ECD (Putcha et al., 2016). This situation has led to weak ECD policy design and implementation and limited scale-up of programs and coverage.

Many reasons could be put forth to explain limited of investment in ECE. One critical one relates to the lack of good data on financing following the fact that information is often scattered around different ministries, or blended into basic education spending. Capturing household spending and non-government stakeholders expenses requires also dedicated data collection exercises, rarely conducted. There is a strong and urgent need for countries to know what is being spent on ECE interventions in order to adequately address financing issues (i.e. supporting investments, estimating financial gaps and searching for other financial sources) (Putcha et al., 2016). Furthermore, inadequate information on costs and the perceived high costs of delivering public ECE programmes have tended to reduce investments from government and led to greater reliance on the private sector and local communities. This in turn has made it difficult to apply national quality standards, further impeding development of the sector.

The issue of ECE cost and financing is all the more critical in the current context marked by decreasing global aid, especially in the education sector and fierce competition for national resources within the education sector, with the pre-primary sector competing not only with primary but also with post primary sectors (secondary and TVET); major sectors of focus for many donors today. These patterns risk to be further exacerbated with the anticipated negative COVID-19 impact on global and national resources mobilization. In contexts of strained resources, countries are all the more in need of strategies of increasing ECE financing, including from public sources and via alternative financing mechanisms.

In order to support adequate resource mobilization, developed sound advocacy message and ensure that a conducive enabling environment is put in place to allow the subsector to reach its full development, one needs to have in place the right diagnostic tools and instruments. As stated above, among areas that deserve increased and urgent attention is the issue of cost and financing available and needed for the subsector to grow. In this panel group, various commonly used cost and financing tools and instruments (i.e., from global to antional education/ECE financial simulation models, ECE funding analysis at national level) will be presented as their related usage to shed light on how they can be customized/used to make the case for increased resources to support quality ECE service provision expansion in an equitable and suitable way, understand the data needs, assess tools/instruments limits and challenges and review the type of policy recommendations/advocacy messages they can support.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Suzanne Grant Lewis, International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) UNESCO

Individual Presentations

• Funding Analysis of Early Childhood Education in the Gambia: Promoting Equitable Access to Quality Services - Diane Coury, IIEP UNESCO

• Strengthening costing and financing of SDG 4.2 in the Asia-Pacific Region Presenters: Kyungah Kristy Bang (UNESCO Bangkok) - Kyungah Bang, UNESCO

• The cost of achieving SDG 4 re-estimated in 2020 - Yuki Murakami, UNESCO

Discussant

• Christin McConnell, Global Partnership for Education