Early childhood development crucial for Rajasthan children

Building capacities of frontline workers on giving parenting tips could significantly improve parental engagement

Early moments matter, especially in the life of a child, to ensure that the child develops to its full potential in terms of cognitive, emotional, social, and physical development. A baby's brain development begins early during pregnancy and is influenced by the mother's health, nutrition, and environment. After birth, it continues to develop rapidly, impacting a child's physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being, learning potential, and subsequently, earning capacity and success in adulthood. Early Childhood Development (ECD) is a comprehensive approach that ensures that every child, from conception to the age of school entry, grows to achieve full developmental potential.

The early childhood period encompasses several distinct phases in a child's life, from 'conception to birth' and from 'birth to 3 years, with a special focus on the first 1,000 days, which is a period from conception to 24 months. This is followed by another important phase of 'preschool and pre-primary years', generally from 3 to 6 years.

During various phases of ECD, the mother and the child require special attention from the family, caregivers, and policymakers – who can play a critical role in creating a protective and stimulating environment for both mother and the child.

Global evidence has proven that when children spend their early years in a nurturing and stimulating environment, their brains can develop at an optimal speed. Advances in neuroscience indicate that a child's brain develops at a never-again-repeated speed of more than one million neural connections every second. These neural connections determine a child's cognitive ability, health and happiness, how they learn and think, their ability to deal with stress, and their ability to form relationships. Good nutrition, protection, play and love in early childhood spark these neural connections in children's brains.

During the next three years, the brain continues to evolve rapidly. Besides nutrition, a family needs to play a lead role in keeping children away from a toxic home environment like domestic violence. Besides, parents should engage in responsive stimulation that comes from reading, singing and interacting with a child. Though health care, nutrition, and protection remain important from 3-6 years of age, a child also needs early learning opportunities at home and in high-quality preschool settings during this phase.

Evidence shows that, on average, ECD programmes cost $0.5 per capita per year when added to existing health and nutrition service-delivery programmes. In comparison, the return on investment is much higher as it yields more than a 13 per cent return in reducing poverty and income gaps and can potentially contribute towards improving individual adult earnings by almost 25 per cent.

The high returns compared to the need for minimum investment offers a value-for-money proposition for Rajasthan, home to an estimated 12 million children under seven years of age. Children below seven years constitute 16 per cent of the total population, the overall human development in the state will depend on how effectively and quickly we are able to realise health, nutrition, education, and related outcomes for every child in the state.

Both the Union and state governments, realising the importance of investments in the early years, have initiated several interventions and created the needed capacity in terms of both the infrastructure and human resources, most notably the triple-A at the grassroots level, i.e., Anganwadi Workers, Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and the Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANM).

UNICEF is also providing the needed support to the state government for mainstreaming some of the critical ECD interventions. The Mother and Child Protection Card (Mamta card) now covers all the critical ECD messages, the Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) has provisions for screening of new-borns for early detection of deficiency, defects, delays and disabilities, guidelines have been issued for both early childhood development actions for the first 1,000 days and Early Childhood Education at the Anganwadi Centres.

Next Steps

Rajasthan has done incredibly well in saving young lives, and phenomenal progress has been made in reducing infant mortality which declined at a pace much faster than the national average. The highlight of the story has been the significant decline in the mortality rate among girls in the age group of 1-4 years from 18 in 2011 to 6 in 2020. However, this now puts significant focus on the need for strengthening the ECD interventions as all the gains made in child survival need to be sustained by continued investments to ensure that all children reach their full cognitive, emotional, social and physical development.

To realise the dream of ensuring every child's holistic development during the early years of life, transformative actions are required in the area of fostering inter-departmental convergence, improving the delivery of essential services through system strengthening, strengthening various forums for parental engagements and investments in building the capacities of frontline workers, strengthening data and evidence-gathering systems for ECD, strengthening social protection measures for vulnerable children and robust public financing measures for ensuring both adequacies in budget and efficiency in spending on ECD.

Rajasthan is known for its innovative contributions to improve social sector outcomes, which should provide an edge for exploring out-of-box solutions as differential strategies are required for reaching children and families residing in the desert, hills, and ravine areas. For instance, while the Anganwadi workers are extremely committed but for some, the limited academic background affects their ability to optimally provide early childhood education services. A potential solution could be to identify committed and educated young women from the community to provide additional support in delivering the quality ECE package developed by the state for children aged 3-6 years.

There is an old African proverb that 'it takes a village to raise a child', which holds so true when it comes to the need for partnerships and collaborations to deliver quality ECD services for children. Early child development is not only a government priority that should figure high in its economic and political agenda but also imperative for the private sector, civil society, academia, parents, and society at large. Let's unite for every child. Early moments matter!

(The writer is the Chief of UNICEF in the Rajasthan office.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.