Consultancy Services: Short-term consultancy to develop paper on methodological approaches for measurement of ECD - DRP, New York |
Closing date: Saturday, 29 July 2017
Position type: Consultancy
Location: United States of America
Division/Equivalent: Partnerships
School/Unit: Data, Research and Policy
Categories: Alliances and Resource Mobilization
If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you.
For 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.
Background & Rationale
Early childhood, which spans the period up to 8 years of age, is critical for cognitive, social, emotional and physical development. During these years, a child's newly developing brain is highly plastic and responsive to change as evidenced by the billions of integrated neural circuits that are established through the interaction of genetics, environment and experience. Early childhood development (ECD) is multidimensional and sets the stage for life-long thriving. In addition, it is one of the most critical and cost-effective investments a country can make and economic analyses have found that investing in the early years a child's life yields some of the highest rates of return to families, societies and countries.
In order to capture information on key domains of early childhood development, UNICEF developed, within the context of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) programme and with inputs from a broad group of experts, a set of specific questions to gather data on the overall developmental status of children. Beginning with the fourth round of MICS (MICS4, primarily implemented between 2009 and 2012), an index was added to the existing early childhood development module to measure overall developmental status of children within the domains of physical, literacy-numeracy, social-emotional and learning (the Early Childhood Development Index or ECDI) and to monitor children's achievement of universal developmental milestones across countries. Prior to the collection of the ECDI in MICS, there was no internationally comparable data on the overall developmental status of children. To date, comparable data on children's developmental status, collected using the ECDI, have been produced for more than 60 low- and middle-income countries.
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