The Global Early Childhood Workforce Meeting, organized under the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, brought together country delegations from 9 countries, as well as representatives of Regional Networks and civil society organizations.
The Meeting, which took place in Washington DC, provided a platform for peer learning for countries to discuss their workforce priorities and efforts, as well as identify possible means of collaboration.
It also took a deeper look into the Home Visiting Workforce Needs Assessment Tool by sharing insights from its use in two countries and exploring ways it can be further adopted or adapted. Learning about commonalities across sectors and contexts, participants were able share current promising approaches and challenges that impede further efforts to support the early childhood workforce.
The Early Childhood Workforce Initiative will use the learnings from this meeting to determine how to best respond to some of the challenges raised and contribute to country, regional and global efforts. Many important takeaways came out of the meeting.
- The energy and commitment to improving the workforce
- Diversity of sectors and organizations – challenging but enriching
- Policymakers, practitioners, donors, researchers
- Desire to learn more about the home visiting tool
- Including questions on, how easily can it be applied to other programs?, how involved should external actors be?, can it be used at different points in planning cycle?
- Further documentation/mapping of promising approaches is needed
- Communication outlets for ECD practitioners
- More training and resources to make the case for supporting the early childhood workforce
- Interest in continued collaborative learning
- Appetite for more in-depth country experiences to be shared
- Pairing countries for peer exchanges
- Question: thematically oriented vs oriented vs sector approaches?
Materials from the Meeting
The slide deck shares notes on challenges and promising approaches shared by meeting participants within the following areas: - Competences and Standards |
The Early Childhood Workforce Initiative Home Visiting Needs Assessment Tool
ECWI recently developed and piloted a needs assessment tool to support policymakers responsible for policy planning and personnel management of ECD programs around the early childhood workforce. The tool focuses particularly on personnel supporting home visiting programs delivered across sectors for pregnant mothers and caregivers with children under 3.If you are interested in accessing the full version or using the Tool, please send an email expressing your interest to Vidya Putcha (vputcha[at]r4d[dot]org). Download an excerpt of the Tool here. |
What do participants say about the meeting?
Watch the clips below to see why participants feel such meetings are important and what insights they took home.