Analysis: The big spender on early childhood
For most developing countries, the World Bank is the agency with the greatest involvement in early childhood provision. But in whose interests is it? Professor Helen Penn takes a critical look.
The biggest spender on early childhood - bigger by far than any corporate company - is the World Bank, with its 2006 investment standing at a colossal US$1.6 billion, up from just US$126m in 1990.
This enormous spending stems from what the Bank sees as its 'holistic' approach to tackling the economic performance of poor countries. Teams of World Bank economists work with governments all over the world, encouraging them to adopt more 'effective' economic policies and arguing, increasingly, that Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes can contribute to their success.
ECD includes child health and nutrition, parenting programmes and community-based care as well as - or instead of - centre-based services. Although its programmes constitute only a fraction of the Bank's overall activities, they nevertheless make the World Bank the major player in early childhood for most developing countries.
At present there are 74 major ECD projects in about 47 countries. Of these, 15 have been freestanding operations and the rest have been education or health projects with an early childhood component. The Bank claims that through its support, many innovations in the design and implementation of early childhood programmes have been introduced across the world.
Along with grants and loans for early childhood, the World Bank maintains an early child development website. This explains the rationales for the Bank's involvement in ECD. It makes chilling reading. As befits a bank, it is all about investment, making a profit over time.
The guiding economic theory is now called 'human capital theory'. Instead of investing in roads, dams, airports and other large engineering projects, human capital theory is about the economic advantage of investing in people. In particular, investing in early childhood gets better results in terms of turning out productive, competitive adults than investing in any other aspect of education.
The guru for this theory about investing in early childhood is the Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman. He re-analysed the findings of what by now are three very dated, randomised controlled longitudinal cost-benefit studies of centre-based education and care carried out in the United States in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with (or on) mainly poor black and Hispanic populations.
Heckman concluded that 'good-quality' centre-based care can make a difference to adult outcomes, turning poor, criminal-prone children into economically productive adults.
Cost-benefit studies
Following in Heckman's footsteps, there has been a huge literature about cost-benefit studies of early childhood interventions, mostly by economists. While there is clearly more than a grain of truth in the claim that early intervention makes a difference to children's lives, others have argued that context is the key.
It is 'magical thinking' to suppose that two years or so in a good nursery on its own can overcome all the problems of poverty and injustice or kit children out to be successful entrepreneurs in a globalised economy. But in any case children are not passive; they cannot be machine-tooled into becoming certain kinds of adults.
The World Bank, for all its rhetoric about putting the world to rights, is at bottom a money-making operation; it seeks ways of bolstering and benefiting from the global world economy. And economic theory cannot easily deal with children's rights - it's a different language.
What does the ECD section in the World Bank actually do? First, it has a mission to inform other World Bank staff, mostly economists, about ECD by 'extending the knowledge base on ECD and building capacity among the Bank's task managers and field practitioners in the design and preparation of ECD interventions'. In particular, it works by:
- pro-actively providing technical assistance and support for policy dialogue about ECD with governments;
- preparing analytical, economic and sector studies, and regional strategy papers on ECD;
- designing, supervising, and evaluating ECD projects;
- providing analytical frameworks, tools and resources for effective implementation of ECD projects;
- closely monitoring ECD projects for best practices and lessons learned.
In addition, the ECD team works to strengthen partnerships with international experts and policymakers and to share knowledge outside the Bank with client countries and the international community. One such example is the attempt to produce an 'ECD calculator'. This has been developed by Dutch economist Jacques van der Gaag, and is supposed to offer senior policy makers in developing countries a way of calculating how much economic payback they will get for investing in ECD, taking into account the subsequent productivity of children who have been through ECD programmes.
But mostly the World Bank funds ECD through other agencies, like the Christian Children's Fund in Africa or local NGOs in the Philippines. It works closely with UNICEF and UNESCO. The emphasis is on community-based parenting programmes, relying on local women where possible to do the work as home visitors or support workers - mostly unpaid. In fact, the less women are paid, the more this constitutes an 'efficiency saving'.
Economic approaches
Efficiency - cutting costs - is a byword of World Bank economic approaches. In some countries they suggest that the most economical policy is to subsidise children in existing provision, although any subsidy system is complicated to operate, especially in countries where the existence of many poor children is simply unregistered in official documentation.
There isn't much attention paid to cultural considerations either, even despite very different family and community traditions from those we are used to in Europe and America. 'Developmentally appropriate practice' and 'ages and stages' dominate most programming.
How does this sit with research that says children benefit from high-quality centre-based care, but may even be harmed by substandard care? Something has got lost in translation. For the World Bank, any ECD programme is better than no ECD programme. In most of Africa, and many other parts of the world, centre-based care is provided by small-time entrepreneurs, with no training and pitiful resources, operating out of cramped huts and backyards in poor areas.
The reality is that people get what they pay for. The elite can afford to pay for well-resourced western-style nurseries with trained staff in purpose-built accommodation. Many, if not most women in the poorest countries operate at the margins, and if they can afford childcare at all it is backyard creches. Professor Jody Heyman from the Global Working Families project based at Harvard University has detailed the horrific accident rates for children of working mothers in poor countries, because of the lack of availability of affordable quality childcare.
This is not the complicated picture of ECD that comes across in the World Bank literature. On the contrary, the World Bank is relentlessly upbeat about investing in ECD - or, as is more often the case, loaning money to poor countries so that they can pay for ECD, on the assumption that they will get their money back when the children grow up.
The World Bank is widely criticised for its economical stance, not least by another Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who was once its chief economist. Its ECD policies deserve our critical attention too.
- More information: Dr Marito Garcia, who is the lead economist for ECD in Africa, will be coming to England on 2 June to speak about the World Bank's approach to Early Childhood Development at a seminar organised by the International Centre for the Mixed Economy for Childcare, to be held at the Overseas Development Institute in London. See www.uel.ac.uk/icmec for details. World Bank: http://go.worldbank.org/7PO2CE8NR0.
