In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Early Childhood Development Action Network (ECDAN) (1) partners have co-developed and launched a Call For Coordinated Action urging global actors to prioritize and invest in the needs of ALL young children and their parents and caregivers, especially the most vulnerable, during the crisis.
In mid-April the GBA joined a growing list of collaborators including multinational organizations such as the World Bank and UNICEF, foundations such as the Lego and the Hilton foundations, and NGOs such as Save the Children who have signed onto the effort, which asks for the following commitments:
Put equity and inclusion at the center of the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.
Support and include parents and other caregivers in the response and recovery efforts.
Prioritize child protection.
Ensure social protection efforts link to health, nutrition, education, and childcare services.
Protect and support frontline workers who provide child-related services.
Sustain and grow investments in an integrated approach to nurturing care.
Develop sustainable pandemic preparedness, response, and recovery capacities at global and national levels that include the protection and well-being of children and their caregivers.
The GBA supports a focus on provision of reading materials, digital and print, to families in their homes. The GBA recognizes that even prior to the pandemic, more than half of the globe’s children did not have access to age-appropriate reading materials at home.
Primary and pre-primary school age children are at particular risk of losing or failing to gain vital literacy skills — which will have a catastrophic effect on life outcomes if left unaddressed. (2)
Joseph Nhan-O'Reilly, Chair of the GBA, says the alliance is delighted to join this important work. “COVID-19 is presenting an enormous problem for children,” he says, “particularly those whose access to reading materials depended on their attendance at school. ECDAN is doing all the right things and coordinating major actors to provide for children during this time. Supporting ECDAN’s call to action reinforces GBA’s desire to connect children with high-quality books and learning materials, regardless of their location or circumstances. I consider it a win-win.”
The GBA is currently supporting fast-track development of a cross-platform search that will help families connect to large collections of the highest quality open education materials, including the Global Digital Library, African Storybook, and others. The platform will make it possible to search these many sources by topic, level, and language. The GBA is also supporting provision of learning materials via radio, offline networks, and print for children who do not have access to the internet.
“The challenge of bringing books to children in remote or low resource areas is not new,” says Rebecca Rhodes, USAID’s Team Lead for Reading & Literacy, who participates in the GBA Secretariat on behalf of USAID. “The hope is that, in responding to this crisis, we will learn new strategies for building systems and local markets that reach those learners, and provide all with the books they need to learn to read.”
ECDAN is a network of key partners representing UN agencies (ILO, UNESCO, UNICEF, and WHO), the World Bank, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), foundations, private sector, ECD regional networks, academics, think tanks and related global initiatives.
See page 70 of Save the Children’s Lessons in Literacy (2016).