Early Childhood Education and Care from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

Early childhood interventions are frequently framed as investments with important benefits in terms of children’s health, nutrition, cognitive development and school readiness. Gender equality and the rights of adult women—as unpaid family caregivers whose lives, by default, must accommodate child-centered interventions and as childcare workers staffing such programs—are often given a short shrift in such narratives. At the global level, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development urges us to think about these issues in an integrated fashion by recognizing the universal and interrelated nature of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their related targets, including those on unpaid care, early childhood education and decent work for women and men. Yet, policies to achieve these goals are often discussed in separate epistemic communities with different approaches to early childhood education and care (ECEC). Conceptions of ECEC as a ‘cost-effective’ investment or as a social right, as a tool for improving child development or also as an alternative to family care, affects program design and implementation, with important implications for women’s rights as paid and unpaid caregivers. Although these divides are pervasive at both the global and the national level, this chapter shows that countries can find pathways for strengthening rights-based and gender-responsive ECEC services, drawing on case studies from Chile, Ecuador and Tamil Nadu (India). Rather than providing specific policy blueprints, global actors should support processes of debate, problem solving and experimentation that create context-specific, nationally owned solutions aimed at the progressive realization of rights for both women and children.