Investments in Children’s Early Years: Creating Brighter Futures

Highlights

• The World Bank has dramatically increased investments in Early Childhood in the last 10 years, from a portfolio of $2.9 billion in 2014 to $18.7 billion in 2024.
• These investments are transforming children’s futures: between 2014 and 2024, worldwide, 240 million children have been vaccinated, 31 million children enrolled in quality preschool education, and 18 million families provided with cash transfers and information to encourage better investments in children’s development and more positive family environments.
• In Morocco, in just five years, the national preschool enrollment rate has increased from 45 percent to 76 percent with an additional 232,000 children enrolled in preschool for the first time.  A new community health model is closing the gap in access to maternal and child health and nutrition services in rural areas with more than 285,000 women and children referred to care in the last year.
• In Bangladesh, the government has introduced an additional year of pre-primary education, with an initial roll-out to 3,000 primary schools and new training to promote play-based learning for 2,000 pre-primary teachers.
• In Liberia, the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program is training young women to become preschool teachers or entrepreneurs opening their own childcare businesses- creating a win-win-win through job creation, better quality early childhood services and the expansion of childcare to enable more women to enter the workforce.

Challenge

Around the world, millions of young children are growing up without the foundational support they need to thrive. More than one in five children below the age of five are stunted—with significantly low height for their age—due to poor nutrition, improper sanitation, and repeated infections. Nearly half of all children aged 3–6 are not enrolled in pre-primary education, and six out of ten children experience physical or emotional abuse on a regular basis.  A lack of investment in early childhood affects both child development and family welfare. Globally, 350 million children lack access to childcare —hindering parents, especially women, from working and earning income to support their families.  With over 90 percent of brain development occurring before age five, a child’s earliest years are pivotal. This formative period shapes not only future learning, health, and behavior—but also lifetime earnings and social mobility.

Approach

The World Bank is working with countries to ensure children get the best possible start in life and overcome these challenges. This begins with quality healthcare and access to good nutrition to help children survive and thrive, and continues with ensuring that children have access to preschool and early learning opportunities.  By taking a two-generation approach – simultaneously supporting children and their parents and caregivers—the World Bank is making sure families have the support they need, including quality childcare, training and support for parents to work and earn more and resources to promote better parenting practices. 

Early Learning Partnership

Recognizing that the pace of progress for young children needed to be accelerated urgently, the World Bank launched the Early Learning Partnership Multi-Donor Trust Fund (ELP) in 2015 to mobilize new resources and innovative approaches to support young children. Since 2015, a group of 12 foundations and governments have committed $170 million to ELP.

ELP finances work in three complementary work streams. First, catalytic small grants provide seed funding to help countries build new programs and policies to support young children and their families and design innovative approaches that can be scaled. Second, ELP finances high-value research and global analytical work to support evidence-based approaches that will generate the biggest impacts for young children and their families, working on frontier areas such as measuring child development, how to structure public-private partnerships, how to reach the most disadvantaged children and effective strategies to improve the quality of services. Third, ELP has rolled out a number of training programs to build the capacity and skills of policymakers working on early childhood and foster fruitful cross-country exchanges for government officials to learn how to deliver more impactful programs.

This approach is paying off. Since the launch of ELP, the size of the World Bank’s ECD portfolio has increased from $2.9 billion to $18.7 billion.  Early childhood investments have increased across all sectors and regions in the last decade: in 2014, only 39 percent of projects included activities to support early childhood, but by 2024 75 percent of all projects included some early childhood activities.  Early childhood spending has increased from accounting for 2 percent of the World Bank’s human development portfolio in 2014 to 22 percent in 2024.

Project Results

The shift in focus to early years has benefited millions of young children and their families, while also supporting structural changes to government policies, financing and collection and monitoring efforts to ensure impact.  More than 240 million children have received essential health support through immunizations. Early childhood learning opportunities have been expanded and improved for 30 million preschool children, and 400,000 preschool teachers have been trained to strengthen education quality. Young children’s families have also received support, with 18 million parents benefitting from financial resources and information to improve parenting practices.

Country-level experiences demonstrate how the World Bank is working with countries to achieve results.

In Morocco, the Improving Early Childhood Development Outcomes in Rural Morocco Project is helping to meet the country’s ambitious commitments to scale up investments in early childhood development. In five years, the national preschool enrollment rate has increased from 45 percent to 76 percent, with even more impressive results in rural areas, where enrollment has increased from 33 percent in 2017 to 91 percent in 2024.  Enrollment for girls increased from 25 percent in 2017 to 93 percent in 2024.  More than 9,000 new preschool units have been opened, and the preschool expansion has also been a major source of new job creation, with more than 9,500 new preschool teaching jobs created (80 percent for women). A new community health model is being rolled out to close the gap in access to maternal and child health and nutrition services, with 285,000 women and children referred to care through this model in just the first two years, and 13 million parents have been reached with a new behavior change campaign to promote better early childhood nutrition.

In Bangladesh, the World Bank began working with the government in 2019 to conduct high-impact research that led to the introduction of an additional year of pre-primary school.  To support this substantial policy change, the Bangladesh Quality Learning for All Program tested an additional year of pre-primary education in 3,000 primary schools and trained 2,000 pre-primary teachers on how to teach using a play-based approach.  The approach is now being scaled up so that all children in Bangladesh will have access to an additional year of free preschool, which will benefit more than 1.5 million children each year.

In Liberia, the Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Young Women (EPAG) Program pioneered an innovative approach to train adolescent girls and young women to become childcare workers or preschool assistants / teachers or to open their own childcare centers. A randomized control trial found impressive results.  Prior to the training, just 45 percent of participants were employed—six months after the training more than 90 percent were employed (with 85 percent of graduates employed in a preschool or childcare facility).  Evaluation results also showed a significant increase in income and savings​, decrease in debt and increased confidence in managing a business/job and in self-reliance financially.  Classroom evaluations of the graduate also revealed better quality teaching and higher classroom quality, compared to a group of preschool teachers who had not received the training.  

Precious Joy Teeweh graduated from the Empowering Adolescent Girls Training Program (EPAG) in Liberia with training on early childhood to become a preschool teacher.  Just a few years later, she was awarded Liberia’s Best Teacher Award in 2022 in recognition of her skills and service.

Through research and global analytical work, the World Bank has developed a number of innovative new approaches to tackle the most pressing challenges in early childhood development. Through the Read@Home initiative, the World Bank is working with governments and other partners in 18 countries to expand access to quality reading and learning materials, reduce the cost of book procurement and distribution, and support parents and caregivers to engage with their children’s learning. Read@Home has reached more than 3.5 million children as of 2025.  In the Republic of Marshall Islands, Read@Home work brought the average cost of purchasing and distributing storybooks down from $9-$19 per book to $1-$2. In Senegal, Read@Home reached 50 percent of all children below the age of 6—2 million children—with quality storybooks.

Early Learning Resource Network: Print-Ready and Digital Resources for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy

Early childhood development portfolio growth overall and as a share of the People Vertical portfolio (2014–2024)

Collaborating across the World Bank Group

Improving early childhood development requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-World Bank Group approach. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank have collaborated to produce guidance for Governments and employers on how to deliver quality childcare that keeps children safe, including developing training for employers and childcare providers and a checklist and quality assurance guidance note that will be rolled out globally through World Bank and IFC projects.

In El Salvador, the World Bank and IFC are partnering to improve early childhood education and childcare in both public and private sectors. The World Bank’s Growing up and Learning Together: Comprehensive Early Childhood Development in El Salvador project, along with ELP funding, supported the development of new early learning standards, curriculum, and professional training programs. To engage the private sector, IFC’s Care2Equal program engaged 12 leading employers (employing more than 23,000 people) to create more family-friendly workplaces through a Peer-Learning Platform. By the end, 11 companies achieved 14 firm-specific goals, including enhancing access to quality childcare and strengthening the recruitment and retention of working parents, especially mothers. 100% of participating companies reported improved knowledge and positive business impacts, such as higher employee satisfaction and productivity, reduced absenteeism and turnover, and a stronger company reputation.

World Bank Group Contribution

The World Bank has invested $18.7 billion in early childhood development from 2014-2024, more than 90 percent of which is through IDA and IBRD. The remaining 10 percent comes through Trust Funds, such as the Early Learning Partnership, the Power of Nutrition, the Global Partnership for Education and the Global Financing Facility for Every Woman and Every Child.

Partnerships

Collaborating with partners is foundational to the World Bank’s early childhood work. In 2022, the World Bank launched the Invest in Childcare initiative, which is designed to expand the size and improve the quality of investments in childcare to boost women’s economic empowerment and child development and generate broader benefits for families, businesses and economies. In just five years, the number of World Bank projects with childcare activities has increased from seven to more than 120 and the initiative is expected to support at least 10 million households with quality childcare by 2030. The work has rolled out through close collaboration with UNICEF, UN Women, ILO, We-Fi, governments, and other partners. Most recently UNICEF and the World Bank worked together to produce a note on “Essential Elements of Quality in Childcare settings,” which will be used in 75+ countries to improve childcare quality and all 90+ activities financed by Invest in Childcare have held consultations with civil society stakeholders to inform work and share results.

Looking Ahead

With job creation as a high priority, investments in the early childhood workforce—preschool teachers, community health workers, and other key personnel—will increase. The linkage between childcare and early childhood and women’s employment will be a critical area for countries to focus on new policies and programs to create better jobs and brighter futures.  Global estimates suggest 96 million new decent jobs could be created in the childcare sector alone if we expand investments in childcare to meet the needs of families. The World Bank has 350 active projects that focus on supporting young children and their families in 95 countries.  These projects are expected to reach 50 million women and children with basic health and nutrition services, enroll 4 million children in preschool and reach more 1.6 million parents with cash transfers and information to support young children’s development.