2021 Countdown Country Profiles for Early Childhood Development
The 2021 Countdown Country Profiles for Early Childhood Development have just been launched. First published in 2018 and updated annually since then, the profiles cover 197 countries and 42 ECD indicators, encompassing 99·8% of the world's children younger than 5 years. This is an important step in establishing a global monitoring and accountability framework for ECD. The profiles draw attention to progress as well as exposing significant gaps, especially in data pertaining to the youngest children and in measuring services and practices to improve nurturing care.
You can download the master database (in MS Excel format) here, and you'll find the full set of country profiles here, with translations in Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish.
Workshop series: nurturing care for children living in humanitarian settings
The Arab Network for ECD (ANECD), International Rescue Committee (IRC), Save the Children, UNICEF and the World Health Organization are working together to organize five workshops across the Middle East between October and December 2021. The workshops will explore implementation of the Nurturing Care Framework in each setting and explore what more can be done to ensure children living in humanitarian settings receive nurturing care. More.
Proceedings from the South-East Asia multsectoral meeting
The meeting report describes the presentations, discussions, and outcomes of a 3-day virtual meeting organized by the WHO South-East Asia Regional Office in collaboration with UNICEF in April 2021. The participating countries were Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste.
• Read the report
• View the meeting materials
Two webinars in September looked at the Thematic briefs "Nurturing care for every newborn" and "Enabling children to grow-up in a smoke-free world". They considered evidence and looked at examples of country level policy and practice. You can view the recordings and presentations here:
• Nurturing care for every newborn
• Enabling children to grow-up in a smoke-free world
Burundi: Cultivating political will and investment
The Ministry of Public Health and the Fight against AIDS, with the support of WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank, organized two events in February 2021: i) a high-level meeting with the First Lady, Ministers, Parliamentarians, partners and funders to raise awareness and investment in ECD and ii) a technical workshop to support a common understanding of ECD across sectors and advance development of a national strategy for ECD.
Find out more here.
