An estimated 250 million children in low- and middle-income countries risk not meeting their development potential in the first five years of life—leading to lifelong impacts on health, learning, behavior, and overall adult productivity. During this critical time, strategic interventions can ensure children have a strong foundation to lead healthy, productive lives as engaged citizens.There is an urgent need to increase access to high-quality early childhood development intervention programs on national andglobal scales. While the science behind the importance of early development and funding for these programs has increased globally, policy development, research, and implementation best practices have not been widely adopted. As the COVID-19 virus disrupts health, nutrition, childcare, and education services, and stretches social and child protection systems to their limits, children and families least able to cope are being hit hardest with inequalities in childhood development widening. Evidence-based policies that support families and young children are needed now more than ever. This course examines best practices in child and family policies, advocacy, financing, and pathways to scale—showing you how to generate an innovative, scalable intervention strategy thatsupports early childhood development.

Benefits

• Gain knowledge about the state of the science on effective interventions for early childhood development.

• Learn what makes programs successful around the world in supporting early childhood development and why some programs fail.

• Reflect on changes for your program, becoming familiar with the steps to design successful interventions that support early childhood development and understand what services you need to prioritize.
• Explore strategies to enable widespread adaptation of quality programming and evaluate the effectiveness of your programming.

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