About this session

Friday, 4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Early Childhood Education Quality: A Majority World Perspective

Access to high-quality early childhood care and education (ECCE), including childcare and preschool, can have multi-generational impacts for children and their caregivers. Reported by the International Labour Organization, in the majority world, women make up a larger proportion of the workforce than ever before at an estimated 39% in 2023 . Current definitions and measures of ECCE quality, however, largely stem from the minority world, biasing quality standards and leading to an incomplete picture of the state of the ECCE sector. In order to understand ECE quality, it is critical to study a range of stakeholders’ perspectives across global contexts on what constitutes quality.

In this panel, we provide three different perspectives on understanding ECCE quality from Pakistan, Colombia, and Vietnam using qualitative and quantitative evidence. The first paper explores teachers, trainers, parents, government stakeholders, and communities’ perceptions on preschool quality in rural Sindh, Pakistan. The second paper explores the use of a monitoring tool to assess quality in community homes in Colombia, and the associations with children’s outcomes. The third paper seeks to understand how childcare quality is conceptualized by childcare providers, government stakeholders, parents, and trainers in the industrialized zones of Vietnam.

These presentations will be led by presenters from primarily minority world countries from three different academic institutions. The chair, experienced in the field of global early child development working in both minority and majority world institutions, will facilitate a thought-provoking discussion on key considerations when defining ECCE quality from diverse, culturally sensitive perspectives.

Paper #1
Title	"Everything is properly placed, and environment is clean": Stakeholders’ perspectives on preschool quality in Pakistan
Presenting author	Karima Rehmani, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, United States

Paper #2
Title	Measuring the quality of early childhood education in Colombia: Pilot study in the community modality
Presenting author	Carolina Maldonado-Carreño, Ph.D., School of Education, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia

Paper #3
Title	“All parents want childcare providers to love their children”: Perceptions of Childcare Quality from Vietnam
Presenting author	Elizabeth Hentschel, Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Aisha Khizar Yousafzai, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, United States

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