Contributions of Early Childhood Development Programming to Sustainable Peace and Development

By intervening early and engaging with children’s families, ECD services offer a unique opportunity to make a cost-effective and sustainable impact on interrupting cycles of poverty and violence. Given that efforts towards sustainable peace must encompass all sectors and address all societal levels, there is a crucial need for implementing “multi-level ECD services” that center on the whole child and engage his or her surrounding ecological context. These comprehensive ECD services can not only improve child development outcomes, but also strengthen competencies in caregivers, address stressors and conflict drivers in the community and build institutional capacities to reduce structural violence.

The purpose of this background paper is to merge insights from both micro and macro-level perspectives to demonstrate how ECD services can be leveraged to sustainable peace and development. While peacebuilding experts have traditionally focused on macro-level strategies such as government reform or economic rehabilitation interventions, ECD practitioners have focused primarily on micro-level interventions of individual children and families without much exploration of how ECD services can be leveraged to mitigate risks of conflict and transform relationships across communities and regions.