Scaling in early childhood spotlight — An introduction

From cutting-edge sensors that let parents hold newborns next to their skin, to interactive classroom robots, early childhood policy isn't short on ideas. On Apolitical’s early childhood deep dive, produced in collaboration with our partner the Bernard van Leer Foundation (BvLF), we’ve written about dozens of interventions that could make the lives of young kids better, everywhere.

But the question is how to bring these ideas to more than the hundreds or thousands who get to experience them first; how to reach millions of people across borders and in different contexts. In short, how to bring them to scale.

So, again supported by BvLF, we’ve set out to explore answers to that quandary. Our spotlight on scaling in early childhood looks at challenges faced, and successes won, by policymakers seeking to change the lives of kids aged 0-5 and their caregivers at scale.

Here’s four key things we learned.

1) Test at scale

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Faculty Director at Yale University’s YRise, told us a cautionary tale: “When you scale things up, it starts to affect the market,” he said, “so wages might start falling if you train too many people in the same job.” Nursery nurses, for example — start training them rapidly and you might undercut wages for those already working the job.

It’s one of the reasons that Mobarak and his team are working to devise ways of evaluating programs with scale in mind — to predict pitfalls sometimes overlooked at the pilot stage.

Elsewhere in the spotlight, we have a practical reflection on why this kind of foresight matters. In an interview, Evidence Action CEO Kanika Bahl talks about the tough decision she took shutter one of its most promising programs, No Lean Season, which after a promising pilot failed to perform as hoped on a larger stage.

She takes a hopeful message from the saga: “Because we were testing at scale, and well beyond you’d typically do in an NGO, we were able to detect that the program wasn’t working.”

2) Meet the parents

Children below the age of five tend to spend large amounts of time in the home, so one way to drive meaningful change for young kids is to change the nature of their interactions with parents.

But how do you bring about that change at scale? Often, that means helping parents to overcome deeply-held cultural norms and prejudices. For example, Sweden didn’t achieve its remarkable rates of fathers taking parental leave, until it introduced a “use it or lose it” clause to its paternal leave policy.

Dads who chose to take leave previously reported being stigmatised. Now, with such a clear incentive, the practice is normal.

And Kangaroo Mother Care, a newborn health intervention that lets babies nestle against their mother’s skin like a young kangaroo in a pouch, has had to overcome varying local sensitivities to achieve its current global reach. Those delivering the project had to find the right messages to encourage mothers to behave in the way they advocated.

In low-income contexts, practitioners have often stressed the increased likelihood of child survival as a result of the program, while in high-income countries, it’s more effective to highlight more holistic benefits, such as improved parent-child bonding that lasts beyond the very earliest days.

3) Don’t forget the workers

A scaling plan might look perfect on paper, but unless there’s people properly equipped to deliver the expanded project, it won’t get far.

In the spotlight, we explore the challenges facing the early childhood workforce. Mark Roland, Program Director at Results For Development, told us the strength of the ECD workforce is “One of the biggest determinants of program quality”. Yet, in many countries, staff are hard to retain or in short supply.

Crucially, the solution isn’t just about extra cash. In Finland, for example, pay for early childhood educators is still modest compared to other professions, but careers in early childhood education are held in very high-esteem culturally. Around 90% of trained educators stay in the profession throughout their career.

Meanwhile, in England, workforce capacity building will mark the difference between success or failure in expanding treatment of maternal mental health. The country's National Health Service is using hosting and mentoring schemes as well as masterclasses to quickly upskill medical professionals in the relevant disciplines. Progress has been strong so far, but will depend on funding remaining focused.

4) The power of institutions

To drive change at scale, sometimes you need a robust, well-established institution behind the program, with the capacity to keep growing its reach.

BvLF’s Cecilia Vaca Jones highlighted how the foundation’s Crianza Feliz program in Brazil, which provides coaching for parents, depending for its success in part on the presence of the Ministry of Social Development’s existing Bolsa Familia cash transfer scheme.

Having that infrastructure there was key. “BvLF has seen many programs work very well at the national level, but when those programs decentralize or deconcentrate their actions, they become weaker,” Vaca Jones said.

Meanwhile, urbanist movements are seeking to leverage the power of strong city institutions to deliver major change — by altering the way they work. In pieces on child centred and feminist urban planning, we highlight how cities can reach millions by tweaking the way they are organised or built. In both cases, however, advocates in many countries have some way to go.

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