Regional agenda
The Regional Agenda for Early Childhood Development is an agreement that seeks to guide the efforts of Latin American countries to strengthen early childhood public policies. It was signed in Bogota in November 2017 by representatives of governments, multilateral cooperation agencies, civil society organizations and the academy.
The Agenda defines four areas in which the signatories agree to prioritize their efforts:
(1) Multi-Sector Collaboration and Financing:Consolidate national childhood development policies or plans, binding for the various entities and agencies involved, that are backed by sustainable investments in the medium- and long-term. It is advisable to have high-level agencies, with political and technical authority, in charge of leading coordination and articulation among sectors.
(2) Quality of Early Childhood Development Services:Establish quality assurance systems for governmental and non-governmental early childhood development services. These systems should be based on the expected development of children, and define both the capacities of the human resources responsible for their care and the technical, material and infrastructural conditions that public and private providers must meet in order to achieve early childhood development benchmarks.
(3) Measuring Early Childhood Development:Define early childhood development goals for the country and establish evaluation mechanisms that make it possible to know the changes and characteristics of children's development. Ideally, these national efforts should allow for international comparisons, especially in the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals.
(4) Collaboration and Alliance-Building:Consolidate collaboration among the different actors interested in early childhood development, establishing national scenarios in which the authorities of the sectors involved meet formally and periodically with allies from civil society, academia, business, the media and the communities. Two important functions of such scenarios include: to follow-up on national policies, plans or strategies for early childhood development and to elaborate proposals to strengthen them.
The Regional Network to Measure Childhood Development was formed as an initiative that supports the third agreement of the Regional Agenda for Early Childhood Development, which calls on countries to establish solid mechanisms for measuring childhood development’s multiple dimensions.
Photo: The Dialogue