Over 43 per cent of children under the age of 5 are at risk of not fulfilling their full developmental potential, due to risks of poverty, poor nutrition lack of access to basic services and early enriching opportunities. Additionally, in a world where prolonged conflicts and emergencies wrought by a changing climate, are increasing, one in 11 children aged 7 and younger have spent the formative early years of their lives surrounded by protracted war and conflict. Juxtaposed against this inequity is the invaluable evidence gained from the remarkable advances in neuroscience that show that a child’s development (including development of the brain) is fundamentally shaped by its environment in the earliest years of its life.*
Our C4D & Early Childhood Development (ECD) section houses a range of resources that offer a more in-depth look at how a wide range of local, national and global organisations are using C4D methods to support ECD across a range of development sectors.
*(Text taken from UNICEF https://washenablingenvironment.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/21072017-ecd-programme-guidance.pdf)
Latest Early Childhood Development News and Resources
Getting girls’ voices heard on the global stage: progress since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action
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National Social and Behaviour Change Communication Strategy for Integrated Early Childhood Development, Nutrition and WASH 2018 – 2024 (Government of Rwanda, 2018)
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Engaging Community Members to Adopt Effective WASH Practices for Nutrition (SPRING brief, 2017)
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Mobile phone-delivered reminders and incentives to improve childhood immunisation coverage and timeliness in Kenya (M-SIMU): a cluster randomised controlled trial (The Lancet, Volume 5:4, PE428-E438, 2017)
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Adding a Nutrition Behavior Change Communication Component to an Early Childhood Development Intervention in Malawi (IFPRI Discussion Paper 01804, 2019)
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Large-Scale Social and Behavior Change Communication Interventions Have Sustained Impacts on Infant and Young Child Feeding Knowledge and Practices – Results of a 2-Year Follow-Up Study in Bangladesh (The Journal of Nutrition, 148:10, 2018)
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How has media programming supported polio eradication? (BBC Media Action Research Briefing, 2018)
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Modelling the effect of a mass radio campaign on child mortality using facility utilisation data and the Lives Saved Tool (LiST): findings from a cluster randomised trial in Burkina Faso (BMJ Global Health 2018;3)
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