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Importance of Being Early
posted (May 22, 2015)
Early education - it's the little acknowledged panacea to many social ills - and UNICEF has started a multi sectorial push to get more kids into productive preschool environments. Today they brought together the Ministries of Education youth and sports with the ministry of human development social transformation and poverty alleviation for a national forum on early childhood development. Health CEO Peter Allen told us it is about getting a strong start in life:..

Dr. Peter Allen, CEO, Ministry of Health
"Early childhood development is such an important component of the work that government does. and now you see that the Ministry of Health of course and health systems all over the world have various programs which begin even before conception with the micro-nutrient supplements to young women of child bearing age and the encouragement of good nutritional practices to young adults. So that we want women, when they choose to become pregnant, and young men when they choose to enter into a relationship which will result in a pregnancy, we want them to do it in a planned way and we want them to be healthy. So that the pregnancy itself has the best possible chance of a successful outcome. Then of course we have our anti-natal clinics and subsequently afterbirth or post-natal clinics. We do our immunization programs, food supplement programs, we encourage breast feeding. Matron Roberts has just become the first poly clinic to be officially recognized by UNICEF as 'mother and baby friendly' and encouraging breast feeding. And then of course we have our child health care clinics where we immunize and vaccinate against certain vaccine preventable diseases. Now, the really important thing about Early Childhood Development is all that is going on in the context of other services that different government departments are also offering. All of that work is really important, but what's perhaps more difficult, that may be in the end be even more important, is when we take the different ministries and all the different actors who are involved and have them working in a collaborative way, in an integrated way and in a coordinated way. Essentially saying that the whole, when it's coordinated is much greater and much better than the sum of the individual parts. And we get some real benefits from this. You can't separate out the health of the child from the education for the child and the social development of the child. So for example we're looking at the child's language skills, we're looking at the child's emotional intelligence as well as the child's ability to count, subtract and to make sensible decisions based on the evidence that's available."

It was a one day event.

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