The Promise of Early Childhood Development in Latin America

Early childhood development (ECD) outcomes play an important role throughout a person's life, affecting one's income-earning capacity and productivity, longevity, health, and cognitive ability. The deleterious effects of poor ECD outcomes can be long-lasting, affecting school attainment, employment, wages, criminality, and social integration of adults. The authors first take stock of ECD indicators in the region and explore access to ECD services for children of different backgrounds. They review recent evidence on the impact of ECD interventions in the region and investigate more deeply a selection of ECD programs in Latin America and the Caribbean to distill lessons related to their design, implementation and institutionalization processes. The book concludes with a discussion of the challenges of scaling up and presents policy options to develop national ECD policies and programs that may be effective and sustained over time.