The early moments of a child’s life matter – and their impact can last a lifetime. The process of a baby’s brain development begins during pregnancy and is influenced by a pregnant woman’s health, nutrition and environment. After birth, a baby’s brain continues to develop rapidly, impacting his or her physical, intellectual and emotional well-being, learning potential and subsequently, earning capacity and success in adulthood.  

Investing in Early Childhood Development is therefore crucial to enable children realize their developmental potential. Apart from the impact on babies and young children, ECD benefits governments, businesses, communities, parents and caregivers. It also happens to be extremely cost effective-  for every $1 spent on early childhood development interventions, the return on investment can be as high as $13.  

In this week’s POSHANWeekly we are proud to highlight the work being done on ECD in Rajasthan.  Based on the WHO Global Nurturing Care Framework (NCF), the ECD program was developed and implemented across 4 districts.  From the results achieved through by program implementation staff, the joint advocacy efforts led to a commitment to deliver ECD at scale across the state.  

The program managers integrated details from the nurturing care framework into a number of existing services. Beyond working to strengthening skills of frontline workers to counsel families with young children, the program has coordinated across the following domains: 

• Child health and nutrition – antenatal care, postnatal care, immunization, monitoring growth, sick childcare, nutrition counselling, management of acute malnutrition and rehabilitation 

• Education – early stimulation, children’s day-care services and centres, pre-primary education  

• Social protection – income-support programmes, health insurance schemes, and childcare 

• Child protection – services for children at risk of neglect/maltreatment  

We hope that through these continuous and collaborative efforts towards ECD, we are able to provide opportunities for brain development and demonstrate that early moments matter. 

We are sharing the following materials and hope that these will inspire and support other state and district government and partners to strengthen ECD programming across India

Kind Regards,
Arjan de Wagt
Chief, Nutrition Programme | UNICEF India 

1. Please note that the CoE SAM Network website has changed from www.coesamnetwork.in to www.coesamnetwork.org

2.  NRC training for MOs, SNs and dieticians
When: 24th, 25th, 26th March
Time: 2-5pm
Click here for link

3. Maternal Nutrition Technical E Dialogue Series                           

Click here for link