This article is written by Adanech Abiebie, Mayor of Addis Ababa

Cities can be wonderful places to grow up, but they can also pose serious challenges for healthy child development. At their best, they can nourish and cultivate the young. At their worst, they can deprive and neglect them.

This is something we are acutely aware of in Addis Ababa, one of the world’s fastest-growing urban areas. Most children in low-income households in Addis Ababa currently lack access to adequate health care and nutrition, protective services, and pre-primary education. Yet the city’s 2018 population of 4.4 million is forecast by the United Nations to rise to 7.35 million by 2028, with some 20% of those children under the age of six. In this article, I provide an overview of our plans for improving early childhood services and education in Addis Ababa—and why it's essential for development. We hope that other cities and countries will be able to learn from our experience so that they can build on and enhance their own early childhood initiatives, creating a brighter and more equal future for all.

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Decades of research have shown that early experiences in childhood have lasting effects on good health and success in school, work, and life. When children enter the workforce, their early childhood experience has an effect on the country’s economy. Every US dollar invested in high-quality zero to five education for disadvantaged children delivers a 13% annual return on investment. There is also robust evidence that investing in early childhood development (ECD) is the single most effective method for societies to break out of cycles of poverty and vulnerability.

As the second-most populous country in Africa with 112 million residents, of whom an estimated 41% are under the age of 15, Ethiopia is a country of great growth potential. In 2000, More than 50% of the population lived below the global poverty line. Between 2000 to 2018, according to World Bank estimates, Ethiopia was the third-fastest growing country of 10 million or more people globally. Between 2010-11 and 2019-20, GDP growth averaged 9.4% per year. The poverty rate fell to 31% and infant mortality more than halved. Our country is working to reach lower-middle-income status by 2025.

Given the clear economic benefits of investing in early childhood development, and the direction set by the national government, the Addis Ababa City Administration decided to make a significant investment in ECD by launching ‘Children: The Future of Hope of Addis Ababa Early Childhood Development Initiative’ in late March, 2021.

The initiative is a commitment to reach all children aged zero to six with an array of programs. We want to ensure that our children are born and remain healthy.

Addis Ababa is not the only city in the world to look at ways of improving early childhood development, but we believe we are among very few to take such a broad approach to the issue. Our strategy is multi-sectoral and designed to bring about structural change in how services are delivered and managed. It involves five federal government ministries and multiple city administration bureaus to improve cross-sectoral coordination. Under the leadership of my office, the initiative is overseen by a steering committee led by the Deputy Mayor and composed of the heads of various sectoral bureaus.

It is crucial for different levels of government—in this case, the federal and city-level administrations—to work seamlessly together to achieve ambitious goals.

But we believe that investing in ECD has great potential to shape our country’s direction.

The organisational structure and programming we designed was influenced by fact-finding trips to other countries, where we exchanged ideas with experts who have implemented similar programs and saw first-hand what others had done. We were then able to take those ideas back home and adapt them to our own context.

Four members of the Addis Ababa municipality—the Deputy Mayor and the Heads of the Bureaus of Health, Education, and Environment—benefited greatly from being enrolled in the Urban95 program in Copenhagen, which helps city planners and urban designers understand how their work can influence child development by viewing cities from 95cm, the height of a three-year-old.

In June 2019, a study tour of the Criança Feliz (Happy Child) initiative in Brazil was organised for a delegation of Ethiopian leadership at the federal and municipal level. This trip helped us prioritise programmatic interventions for our own city.

Similarly, exchanging knowledge and experience has been a key part of our partnership with the Bernard van Leer Foundation and Big Win Philanthropy, which has helped us improve  management capacity, monitoring and evaluation, and communications.

Our contacts with experts and other initiatives led us to establish our own Center of Excellence for ECD, which we believe will be the first of its kind in Africa. The Center will be a hub for advancing ECD research, training and best practices, guiding ECD policy and programmes at the federal, regional and continental level, and sustaining the ECD sector in Ethiopia for the next 20 to 30 years.

We hope to create an international network of capability and expertise, by collaborating with researchers, policymakers and early childhood educators everywhere to promote innovative early childhood pedagogies. While it is early days for the center and for our programming, we hope we are developing a model that could support and inform municipal authorities and planners in many of the world’s fastest-growing urban areas.

For the Children: The Future Hope of Addis Ababa Early Childhood Development Initiative itself, nine strategic areas have been identified: parent coaching, community-run ECD centers, publicly financed daycare centers, expanded access to preschools, learning through play programming, establishing the ECD Center of Excellence, effective cross-sectoral governance, an improved regulatory system, and sound measurement, learning, accountability, and data for decision-making. The program prioritises reaching 330,000 low-income households with comprehensive interventions.

We will champion the creation and revitalisation of urban spaces by making them greener and more accessible for play, through partnerships with the private sector and civil society. We will ensure the construction of play areas within new public housing complexes, paying attention to the requirements of early childhood, and we will improve sidewalks and public transport to ensure safety and accessibility for children and their caregivers.

This initiative has been designed to dovetail with ongoing social projects such as the establishment of daycare centers in government offices, the government’s schools’ feeding program for 600,000 students, and the recently launched project to feed the poorest of the poor. Our commitment to improve ECD extends to benefiting from public infrastructure projects such as housing and open public space planning, working with the Addis Ababa Riverside Development, which recently opened five public parks, a library, multiple greeneries, playgrounds and sports centers, and national platforms such as the Urban Health Extension Programme and the Urban Safety Net Programme.

By 2025, we intend to reach the 330,000 identified vulnerable households, and to provide universal access to comprehensive early childhood development. This is a bold ambition.

But we believe that investing in ECD has great potential to shape our country’s direction. For many years, Ethiopia was a country that could barely plan beyond survival. That era is now behind us. Nurturing and nourishing our youngest children is integral to building a strong foundation for a better future. — Adanech Abiebie

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