New Lancet Series: Early Childhood Development and the Next 1000 Days

Description

Building on the first 1,000 days of life that span from conception to two years of age, the ‘next 1,000 days’ of a child’s life from two to five years of age offer a window of opportunity to promote nurturing and caring environments, establish healthy behaviors, and build on early gains to sustain or improve trajectories of healthy development.

This new two-part Lancet series on early childhood development focuses on the transition to the ‘next 1,000 days’ of the life course, describing why this developmental period matters, identifying the environments of care, risks, and protective factors that shape children’s development, estimating the number of children who receive adequate nurturing care, and examining whether current interventions are meeting children’s needs.

In low- and middle-income countries, an estimated 181 million children 3- and 4-year-olds are not receiving nurturing care, thus jeopardizing their development. The series summarizes the evidence, benefits, and costs of key strategies to support children’s nurturing care and development in this age group, and explores the cost of inaction, finding that the societal cost of not implementing a basic early childhood care and education (ECCE) package at a global level is large, with an estimated foregone benefit of 8–19 times the cost of investing in ECCE.

The series stresses the need to provide access to adequate nurturing care, including equitable access to high quality ECCE, safe and supportive environments with adequate stimulation, protection from physical punishment, adequate nutrition to all children, universal developmental screening, and financial supports for vulnerable populations.

Speakers

• Dr. Günther Fink
  Dr Fink is the Eckenstein-Geigy Professor of Epidemiology and Household Economics at the University of Basel, as well as the Head of the Household Economics and Health System Research Unit at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. He holds an MSc in International Economic Sciences, a MA in Applied Economics and a PhD in economics. Prior to joining the Swiss TPH and University of Basel, he researched and taught for 11 years at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work focuses on developing and evaluating new and innovative approaches to improving health and development in low-resource settings and on measuring the long-term economic benefits of health improvements, particularly during the early childhood period. He is the principal investigator of ongoing cohort studies in Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, Laos, Peru, Tanzania and Zambia, and collaborating with a range of global partners on intervention trials in Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Laos, Uganda and Zambia.
• Dr. Aisha Khizar Yousafzai
  Dr Yousafzai is the Professor of Child Development and Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, USA. Her work is situated in the broader context of child and adolescent health and development, particularly among children growing up in highly disadvantaged circumstances and who are at risk for failing to meet their developmental potential. Her research is directed to designing, implementing and evaluating interventions, strategies, and practices intended to mitigate the effects of exposure to early adversity on children’s development, with a particular focus on children and families in the majority world. She has focused on improving child development in the majority world, understanding the structures and capacities of various delivery systems to identify and scale effective interventions across a diversity of healthcare, caregiving, and education cultures, making improvements in child health and development, and thus in population health and health equity more broadly. She works closely with UN agencies, foundations and networks to support child development.
• Dr. Milagros Nores
  Dr Nores is the Co-Director for Research and Associate Research Professor at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Her research focuses on early childhood evaluation, data-driven policy and programming, cost and benefits of early interventions, evaluation design, equity, and English language learners. Her background is in early childhood program evaluation, the economics of education, and international and comparative education. Currently, her work includes studying a high-quality early care and education program in Colombia, examining parental-child educational practices for minority children in the U.S., evaluating Seattle’s preschool program, the West Virginia preschool program, and the Early Care and Education system in Indiana, developing a child formative assessment for Trinidad and Tobago, and studying teacher’s play facilitation in Colombia, among others. She recently concluded her appointment to a special commission of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which studied the Opportunity Gap for Young Children from Birth to Eight in the United States.