These 2023 “Country Profiles for Early Childhood Development” are developed by UNICEF in collaboration with Countdown to 2030 Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health. The profiles are an attempt to compile, in one place, the available data for country and cross-country monitoring and to provide a baseline against which progress can be monitored.Read More →
These 2025 “Country Profiles for Early Childhood Development” are developed by UNICEF in collaboration with Countdown to 2030 Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health. The profiles are an attempt to compile, in one place, the available data for country and cross-country monitoring and to provide a baseline against which progress can be monitored.Read More →
The 2025 Country Profiles for ECD (in AR,EN,FR,SP,RU) were developed by UNICEF in collaboration with Countdown to 2030 Women’s, Children’s & Adolescents’ Health.Read More →
This Concept Note responds to requests for guidance on monitoring implementation of the Nurturing Care Framework. It outlines considerations for developing a national monitoring system and provides examples of illustrative indicators.Read More →
The UNICEF Vision for Early Childhood Development is guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and supports the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It outlines UNICEF’s intent to support an organization-wide approach to child development in the early years of life, drawing on its mandate for child rights, multisectoral expertise, wide on-the-ground presence, and long-standing role as a trusted adviser to governments and partners at national, regional and global levels.Read More →
This WHO-UNICEF report provides principles and approaches to intentionally include the needs and aspirations of children and young people with developmental disabilities in policy, programming and public health monitoring.Read More →
This scoping review aims to identify implementation pathways of Reach Up (RU) and Care for Child Development (CCD) programmes in low- and middle-income countries. The review includes 33 programmes from 23 low- and middle-income countries. A thematic analysis identified 37 implementation strategies across six “building blocks of implementation”: programme emergence, intersectoriality, intervention characteristics, workforce, training, and monitoring systems. Read More →
This collection of interventions and tools, developed by the Family Strengthening Task Force, is designed to offer family strengthening resources for supporting families in humanitarian settings. Resources range from programming interventions and campaigns to evaluation tools and evidence reviews and covers multiple sectors including child protection, gender-based violence, mental health and psychosocial support, education, and nutrition. The information provided here comes from a range of publicly available sources and is subject to change.Read More →
The city government of Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, is taking a multisectoral, holistic approach to ensuring all children get the best start in life. This program seeks to provide universal access to comprehensive ECD services for all children in the city and to reach vulnerable children in 330,000 low-income households with intensified ECD services by 2026.Read More →
This Progress Report looks back on the first five years since the launch of the Nurturing Care Framework. It reflects on achievements from 2018 to 2023, drawing attention to areas where there has been significant change, as seen primarily through key informants’ perspectives.Read More →
This guidance aims to support USAID missions and operating units in understanding how they can operationalize the Global Child Thrive Act through planning, implementing, and monitoring and evaluating integrated and inclusive approaches to improve early childhood development.Read More →
In this brief, Global TIES researchers evaluate a phone-delivered version of a parenting program in the Middle East and the first randomized-controlled evaluation of an audio-only parenting program. Read More →
This video is a testimonial from a caregiver living in Jordan who has been supported by local health care workers to better support the development of her 5-year old child, Ayla. The support has been provided through the Ahlan Simsim (Welcome Sesame) initiative in Jordan.Read More →
This 4 page brief summarizes the rationale and implementation strategies of the Ahlan Simsim initiative, as well as the prelminary results. It shows that caregivers want to know more about how they can support their children’s development and that health workers, when equipped with the right content and tools, can respond to this need. Read More →
These articles explore implementation of ‘Reach Up’ in multiple low- and middle-income countries. The papers illustrate how it can be delivered through multiple platforms, including home visits, group settings, and health facility contacts and community outreach. Read More →
This WHO package provides a standardized way to monitor the development of young children up to three years of age. It is a new global solution that will allow countries, programmes and researchers to gather and use data on early childhood development to better invest in services and support for young children and their families.Read More →
This Thematic Brief shows how responsive feeding relies on and supports the integration of all five components of nurturing care into the feeding process. It explains what is meant by responsive feeding and how to create the enabling environments for caregivers to responsively feed their young children.Read More →
Home-based records have a long history, initially used to record proof of smallpox vaccinations in the mid-1800s. Today, more than 163 countries use a form of home-based record, such as antenatal notes, vaccination-only cards, child health booklets or integrated maternal and child health handbooks. This publication recommends home-based records to improve care-seeking behaviours, men’s involvement and support in the household, maternal and child home care practices, infant and child feeding and communication between health workers and women, parents and caregivers. Read More →
This 15-minute pre-recorded presentation was prepared by the World Health Organization for the International Conference on Early Childhood Development in Islamabad, Pakistan (February 2023).Read More →
Forty-two randomised controlled trials with 15,557 infants were included in the narrative synthesis to determine the effect of early childhood development interventions delivered by healthcare providers (HCP-ECD) on child cognition and maternal mental health.Read More →
