Early childhood development at CUE

The Early Childhood Education Global Hub is a public good that provides a one-stop shop for policymakers, funders, civil society, and advocates around the world tracking progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2—equal access to quality pre-primary education.

Through key data insights, an interactive map, and deep dive country-focused and thematic case studies, the hub can help build a compelling case for urgent policy change and investment in young children’s learning and development. The hub’s content is periodically updated to reflect new information.

The Childhood Cost Data initiative aims to build global and local momentum and capacity to generate high quality, comparable cost data on programs seeking to improve cognitive, psychosocial, nutritional, and health outcomes of all children and young people. With this goal at the center, over the last decade, the initiative has striven to identify the barriers to costing and put solutions into practice through the development of tools and resources for cost collection and analysis. The work has included the development of the Childhood Cost Calculator (C3), a free, user-friendly online tool for costing programs focused on children and youth across the education, health, nutrition, and social protection sectors.

The accompanying Cost Data Explorer is a public database that seeks to increase the amount of high-quality publicly available cost data. In addition, the team has been working to garner global support for this mission by leading working groups that bring the global early childhood and education community together. This includes the Global Education and ECD Costing Consortium (GEECC), established in partnership with the Early Childhood Development Network (ECDAN) and the initiative that replaced it, the Global Costing Taskforce comprised of policymakers, implementers, funders, and researchers from across the globe.

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This workstream produces research that aims to increase the volume of equitable, efficient, and effective funding for early childhood development programming. In particular, the work focuses on the potential for innovative financing, including impact bonds and outcomes funds to address the barriers to improved development outcomes. Over a decade of research in this field has placed Brookings at the forefront of the knowledge on this innovative financing mechanism, informing important policy changes, initiatives, and projects focused on ECD across the globe.

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This area of research focuses on vulnerable children such as refugees, migrants and others displaced or impacted by conflict, climate change, economic and political challenges, and more in the United States and around the world. The aim of the work is to support policymakers and donors in making evidence-based investments and policies.

This area of research focuses on Playful Learning Landscapes, which seeks to address learning inequalities that exist outside of the classroom by marrying the science of learning with urban design and placemaking. Playful Learning Landscapes is about ensuring playful learning in any space that young children and families go—bus stops, parks, supermarkets, laundromats.

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