PATH reposted this
In late-May, I had the honor of joining over 500 attendees at the Asia-Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood (ARNEC) Regional Conference on Early Childhood Development (ECD) in Penang, Malaysia. I was a bit of an oddball at the conference, since the vast majority of my 12-plus years of experience in the ECD space has been in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, I was humbled and excited to note the relevance of materials produced, approaches tested, and lessons learned from our work funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, USAID, UNICEF, Bainum Family Foundation, Van Leer Foundation, Big Win Philanthropy, Jacobs Foundation, Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), World Food Programme, and others in sub-Saharan Africa. At the conference, I joined fellow panelists to share PATH's efforts to scale up the provision of developmental monitoring and counseling as an integral component of routine primary health care. By providing technical assistance to subnational governments in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mozambique, while simultaneously strengthening the national enabling environment, such integrated ECD services are reaching several million people in multiple geographies. At the same time, the conference provided excellent opportunities to network with colleagues from the Asia-Pacific region, learn from their experiences, understand the applicability of these models in the sub-Saharan African context, and profoundly appreciate that in spite of the superficial differences between the health sector contexts in Asia and Africa, the challenges are often similar—as are the solutions.