Unfortunately, my international contact has not returned my emails for two weeks. As a result I have been exploring Harvard’s University’s “Global Children’s Initiative”.
Harvard is attempting to build an integrated international approach to child survival, health, and development in the earliest years of life. The Center on the Developing Child has launched the Global Children’s Initiative as the centerpiece of its global child health and development agenda. The programs focus is on three strategic areas:
· reframing the discourse around child health and development in the global policy arena by educating high-level decision-makers about the underlying science of learning, behavior, and health, beginning in the earliest years of life;
· supporting innovative, multi-disciplinary research and demonstration projects to expand global understanding of how healthy development happens, how it can be derailed, and how to get it back on track; and
· building leadership capacity in child development research and policy—focused on both individuals and institutions—in low- and middle-income countries to increase the number and influence of diverse voices and perspectives that are contributing to the growing global movement on behalf of young children.
Below you will find some of their projects.
Global Children’s Initiative is launching its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. This project will use the science of child health and development to help guide stronger policies and investments for the benefit of young children and their families in Brazil.
Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância is in collaboration with the Center, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. This collaboration will foster a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable society.
Together, these organizations will engage in the following activities:
· Building a scientific agenda and community of scholars around early childhood development;
· Synthesizing and translating scientific knowledge for application to social policy. This will include working with the Center’s longtime partner organization, Frameworks Institute, to effectively communicate the science of child development in the Brazilian cultural context;
· Strengthening leadership around early childhood development through an executive leadership course for policymakers;
· Translating and adapting the Center’s existing print and multimedia resources for a Brazilian audience.
There have been a large number of studies investigated on the impact of early childhood experiences on children’s developmental, health, and educational outcomes in developed countries. Little evidence is available on early childhood development in sub-Saharan Africa. To address this gap, the Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, the University of Zambia, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University launched the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) in 2009. This collaborative effort measures the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children’s development in Zambia. ZECDP created a new comprehensive instrument for assessing children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development before and throughout their schooling careers which is the first assessment tool of its kind in Zambia. The Zambian Child Assessment Test (ZamCAT) combines existing child development measures with newly developed items in order to provide a broad assessment of children of preschool age in the Zambian context. These collaborators hope that the data collected will not only improve understanding of child development but also help identify interventions to improve outcomes in a rapidly changing developing world.
Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), “A Good Start,” is a collaborative project in Santiago, Chile. Its efforts are to improve early childhood education through teacher professional development. The idea is to improve the quality of educational offerings for four-to-six-year-olds, particularly in the area of language development. This project is designed to intervene in critical health areas that improve school attendance as well as socio-emotional development. It seeks to involve the children's families in their education.
This project will eventually encompass 60 schools. UBC incorporates a comprehensive evaluation: a cluster-randomized experiment in all 60 schools. This type of longitudinal evaluation in early education has not been carried out in any other country in Latin America and will place Chile at the forefront of demonstrating the impact of a high-quality early education.
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