The first five years of life lay an important foundation for children’s future schooling, health and earnings. Yet over 77% (table 2) of children in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to early childhood care and education. This places them at risk of not reaching their development potential.
In response, governments across Africa are increasingly committing to expanding enrolment in pre-primary school.
But research suggests that expanding enrolment is not enough. It’s also important to create healthy, nurturing learning environments that help prepare children for primary school.
Economists like us have an interest in this because we want to be able to help design effective and scalable early childhood education programmes and policies. We need to know:
what types of pre-primary education programmes are offered?
