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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
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2

Defining Family and Community Investments in Context

Demissie Habte, President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, noted Ethiopia and the global community are taking an increasingly active role in making investments in children. Referencing traditional wisdom, Habte surmised the future of humankind depends on its children. To prepare children for such a role, he noted their growth and development are critical. He placed the responsibility in the hands of families and the community at large. The state and art of today’s science dictate how families and communities act on this responsibility, and Habte drew on examples from Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa to illustrate his point. Despite traditions that support children through their development, morbidity and mortality remain high among children in Ethiopia and in several parts of Africa, as do inadequate educational facilities and widespread poverty exacerbated by poor living conditions. Habte noted all of these factors in concert impede the development of the full potential of children. He credited advances in science and technology as well as the increasingly active role governments, civil organizations, and the international community have taken to support the developmental potential of children in the African context. While investments in children vary across the lifecycle, those that occur before birth support the health of mothers before and after birth, provide infrastructure and services to ensure a safe birth, and support children in their early years are particularly important. Habte referenced the need for policies to support science if children are to assume the critical role the young are expected to play across African societies.

Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
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DEFINING FAMILY AND COMMUNITY INVESTMENTS

Larry Aber, Willner Family Professor in Psychology and Public Policy at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and University Professor at New York University, pointed to the height of the HIV crisis in Africa to suggest that even when communities and families were at their absolute lowest points, most of the burden, energy, and investments in children came from families and communities. Aber went on to stress it is almost impossible to overestimate how disproportionate it is that families and communities make investments in children compared to investments from government, industry, and other stakeholders, not only in dire times but also in relatively normal times. He illustrated this point with an Innovation for Poverty Action Lab study1 from a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa that found more than 80 percent of preprimary-aged children are enrolled in some form of early education and more than 80 percent of these children are attending private schools funded by the meager fees of some of the most impoverished families.

Referencing the African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child,” Alex Coutinho, Executive Director of the Infectious Diseases Institute of Makerere University in Uganda, applied this adage to the multidisciplinary and multisector demands of the field of early childhood. Coutinho stressed that for children to successfully navigate a progression from surviving to thriving and finally, transforming, they need to experience the ability to love and to be loved, boast adequate self-esteem, and explore curiosity about all things, yet also be supported by access to education, health, and social services. Coutinho pointed out that if families and communities are going to function effectively the global community and national and local governments need to create the policies and resources to allow families and communities to invest in their children, with a particular focus on peace and stability, food and nutrition, health, education, social protection services, safe water, sanitation, environmental hygiene, and energy, among others. Families and communities function best where governments in Africa are supportive, strong, and committed to investing in those key aspects necessary for children. Coutinho went on to state that to be child focused requires a fundamental focus on families. Coutinho defined key inputs at the family level. These inputs (see Box 2-1) safeguard parents to stay alive and healthy so they may be linked to resources that simultaneously empower their rise out of poverty and allow their children to thrive.

Shifting to communities, Coutinho added that communities act as

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1 See http://www.poverty-action.org/study/exploring-early-education-programs-peri-urban-settings-africa-nairobi-kenya (accessed October 20, 2015).

Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
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buffers and provide resilient structures to ensure a trajectory from child survival to long-term outcomes and impacts so communities become positive gatekeepers of change for a child’s needs amid an uncertain future. Communities are key to developing the culture, tradition, and belonging of a child by giving identity, history, meaning, and a future. Equally important is the role of communities to be vocal advocates to help families adopt pro-child and pro-development practices. To do this, Coutinho stressed communities need to be linked with national and community resources that are often embedded in systems of culture, tradition, religion, self-help groups, and microfinance to provide parents opportunities for employment, life skills, the ability to trade, better agriculture, cash transfers, and good livelihoods so that, in turn, they have the tools and the abilities to invest in their children across the areas of health, education, nutrition, and social protection.

Coutinho reminded workshop participants that in the African context, no single approach is necessarily transferable, but there are some commonalities. He stated that critically important across all communities is the empowerment that derives from top-down leadership when the global community and national governments support family and community investments in their children. Yet it is difficult to focus on and invest purely in the child without investing more broadly in the larger family structure, Coutinho cautioned. While families may mean well, they require the education and ability to be empowered in the necessary areas for optimal child development beyond the external monetary or social benefits that may be acquired by having a child. In an era accentuated by democracy, Coutinho affirmed that the true measure of democracy

Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×

is whether communities and individuals receive the services they need while having their rights met. It is fundamentally important that families and communities are supported in such a way to understand what their rights are and to have the freedom to advocate for these rights to ensure strong villages. To do so, Coutinho argued, requires strong and supportive nations placing the onus on individual countries to be part of a global village in order to thrive.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE HOW FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES INVEST IN YOUNG CHILDREN

Gillian Mellsop, Ethiopia Country Representative for UNICEF, affirmed that while investing in young children is one of the most effective and preventative interventions with great impact on the many challenges that thwart family and community development, early childhood development programs are among the most underfunded globally (UNESCO, 2007). She explored the social and cultural factors that influence how families and communities invest in young children, particularly given that many young children and families around the world do not have access to adequate support to create enriched environments during the critical period of a child’s life. Mellsop pointed out that recent advances in neuroscience show that while genes may provide the blueprint for brain development, the environment shapes it. In defining social and cultural factors that influence investments in young children, Mellsop highlighted two key issues, which she encouraged workshop participants to keep central throughout the course of the workshop discussions.

The first issue Mellsop highlighted is that early childhood is the inaugural stage of lifelong learning and development. She encouraged a holistic approach to children’s learning and development and programmatic alignment with primary learning. One of the main advantages of early childhood development, stated Mellsop, is its potential to break down inequity in learning outcomes from the very early ages by leveraging the tremendous capacity of early brain development and function. She went on to say investments in early childhood yield savings by mitigating or preventing later learning and behavioral difficulties such as grade repetition and dropouts at school. It equalizes chances for all girls and boys to have a strong start. Stimulation, reading, drawing, and other positive healthy interactions spark neural connections. In childhood development, the earlier the intervention the better, suggested Mellsop, where science is increasingly pointing toward a more holistic definition of early childhood development that includes not only education, but interventions that also include health, nutrition, and social protection.

Second, Mellsop pointed to the reality that most young children and

Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×

families do not have access to adequate support to create enriched environments. Approximately one in three children under 5 years of age in low- and middle-income countries are not achieving their cognitive development potential (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007). This can be attributed to the fact that there is only 58 percent enrollment in preprimary education globally, with far lower enrollment figures in low-income countries and the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa (20 percent) (UNESCO, 2007). Highlighting Ethiopia, Mellsop stated that 66 percent of children between the ages of 4 and 6 do not attend a school readiness program (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2006), despite the country’s unprecedented progress in preprimary education in the past decade. If more than half of the children in this age bracket were to attend preprimary education in Ethiopia, where they would be given the opportunity to develop their full developmental capacity when they reach child-bearing age, Mellsop noted these benefits could be passed on to their children. In this way, Mellsop pointed out that early childhood education can break the vicious cycle of intergenerational deprivation.

UNICEF is supporting several school-readiness programs in Ethiopia as part of the integrated national early childhood care and education policy and strategic framework. Taking a child-to-child approach, the school-readiness program is a 36-week program targeting children the year before they enroll in primary school. The program is conducted by trained, young facilitators, whereby children in grades 5 and 6 are supported by trained teachers. The child-to-child approach seeks to embrace the three dimensions of school readiness: (1) a child’s readiness for school; (2) family and community readiness to support children in school; (3) and the school’s readiness to receive children and foster optimal learning environments. Mellsop stated the child-to-child approach in conjunction with two other initiatives resulted in an increase in national early childhood care and education gross enrollments for children between the ages of 4 and 6 from 5.6 percent in 2009–2010 to 34 percent in 2013–2014 (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2014). Mellsop noted it is important to point out the significantly high regional disparities across Ethiopia. In doing so, she stated that future research on these early learning programs needs to assess the relative effectiveness of not only different program deliveries, but also identify ways to scale up early learning modalities so that these programs are able to reach the underserved. She also noted resources need to be mobilized to ensure quality and sustainability of early childhood programs on the premise that the earlier the investments are made in children, the greater the results will be. Mellsop urged continued advocacy for increased budgets for early learning needs to match the robust efforts already occurring in early learning so that these activities may be sustained and scaled.

Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×
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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×
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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×
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Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×
Page 11
Suggested Citation:"2 Defining Family and Community Investments in Context." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally: Summary of a Joint Workshop by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21883.
×
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To examine the science, policy, and practice surrounding supporting family and community investments in young children globally and children in acute disruptions, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop in partnership with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from July 27-29, 2015. The workshop examined topics related to supporting family and community investments in young children globally. Examples of types of investments included financial and human capital. Participants also discussed how systems can better support children, families, and communities through acute disruptions such as the Ebola outbreak. Over the course of the 3-day workshop, researchers, policy makers, program practitioners, funders, young influencers, and other experts from 19 countries discussed how best to support family and community investments across areas of health, education, nutrition, social protection, and other service domains. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

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