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Community of Practice: What happens when experts committed to Early Childhood Development come together?

July 5, 2022 por Diana Hincapié - Florencia Lopez Boo - Belén Michel Torino Leave a Comment


Government authorities, scholars, civil society organizations, businesses, project implementers, and innovators. All these stakeholders play a key role difficult to replace. Now let’s imagine that all these diverse individuals from different backgrounds and expertise are having the same conversation: Promoting the development of children from 0 to 5 years of age in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It might seem like a difficult meeting to coordinate, but we knew it wasn’t impossible. That is why we created the Community of Practice in Early Childhood Development, led by the Early Childhood Development (ECD) Innovation Fund. This community was recently launched with an event with more than 70 specialists and innovators, who participated in the workshop Adaptability and Innovation: Keys to Quality Care in Early Childhood.

The success of a community of practice is possible with the active participation of its members

The international expert in child development, Joan Lombardi, opened the meeting with this remark, taking communities of practice in child development in different regions of the world as reference.

She also kicked off a productive session in which specialists and project implementers shared lessons learned from the design and implementation of virtual and hybrid modalities in early childhood services in Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Panama. Initiatives with effective content to create an emotionally supportive environment for caregivers and children in Jamaica were explored. In addition, a communication campaign developed in Peru with awareness-raising resources and tools to promote quality interactions between caregivers and children at scale was presented. Furthermore, multiple videos sent by different innovators in the region were disseminated among the participants for them to know each other’s work. All these resources of knowledge gave way to an exchange in which two very current and relevant questions were addressed: How to generate innovation at scale? and How to generate adaptability and innovation to reach the most vulnerable population?

Regional collaboration as a key element  

It was thrilling to listen to stakeholders from across the region answering these questions and acknowledging the common ground that exists within the child development work. Among the ideas shared on how to best address existing challenges, we can highlight:

  • Generate opportunities for all without leaving anyone behind. Cooperation and partnerships will be essential for this and for being able to scale up projects that have proven their effectiveness.
  • Beyond individual efforts, it is necessary to generate and install capacities in governments and foster an increasingly larger network of implementers to share and socialize knowledge, good practices, and lessons learned. This will drive the development of new human capital to promote child development in each country.
  • Facilitate participatory processes for the design and implementation of projects with the communities and users of the innovations, which identify the needs of each population, and programs that consider the problems, resources, and challenges identified in these processes.
  • Finally, the most persistent idea was that collaboration and partnerships are key elements in early childhood work.

On the other hand, participants highlighted key aspects for successful implementations adapted to the new challenges in post-pandemic times. For example:

  • Deeply know the community to inform the design of interventions and adapt them to the particular context.
  • Use technologies that allow programs to scale up.
  • Build digital ecosystems that facilitate communication among diverse stakeholders.
  • Test pilots and evaluate before implementing programs at scale.
  • Develop innovations that are integrated into existing services with periodic evaluations to sustain quality at scale.

Takeaways such as these justify the creation and strengthening of this Community of Practice and indicate that this conversation must continue and be extended to other relevant stakeholders of the region.

The Community of Practice seeks to go further: key issues and incidence

Aside from driving collaboration and knowledge exchange among various sectors dedicated to early childhood, this Community of Practice seeks to go beyond: it is committed to promoting dialogue around key issues and strategies of the regional policy agenda on child development, as well as positioning these regional views at a global scale through creation of content, strengthening of knowledge networks, and generation of synergies.

This conversation is just beginning.

To learn more about diverse early childhood initiatives from Latin America and the Caribbean, visit the ECD Knowledge Hub in Latin America and the Caribbean, a one-stop site that displays more than 2,000 resources on early childhood produced in the region and a map featuring innovative projects across our countries.

We invite you to join this conversation by sharing your work related to early childhood with the hashtag #LaCECDHub and leaving your comments below.

We’ll stay in touch!

The Early Childhood Development (ECD) Innovation Fund is a partnership between the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), FEMSA Foundation, Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Porticus, and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation that funds, designs, implements and evaluates innovative and scalable solutions to improve the lives of children in Latin America and the Caribbean.


Filed Under: Early Education Tagged With: child development, community of practice, early childhood, Early Childhood Development, ECD, IDB, innovation, Inter American Development Bank

Diana Hincapié

Diana Hincapié has been a Senior Associate Economist at the IDB's Education Division since 2014. Diana directs and collaborates on various research projects related to the quality of education, particularly on issues of teacher policy, the skill development process, early childhood development, and the extended school day. Diana also works in the design and implementation of impact evaluations of educational programs and policies in the region, and in the design of evaluations for IDB programs. She has worked in the IDB Research Department, the World Bank's Poverty and Gender Unit in Washington, DC, and the Center for Economic Development Studies at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Diana holds a PhD in Public Policy and Public Administration from the George Washington University, and is an Economist with a Master's in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).

Florencia Lopez Boo

Florencia Lopez Boo is a leading economist in the IDB's Social Protection and Health Division, where she works on child development and poverty reduction projects. She was a professor at the University of Louvain and worked at the World Bank and UNIDO. She has a PhD in Economics from Oxford University (Clarendon-Oxford University Press award). She is also a Young Lives Research Associate at the University of Oxford and the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA) in Bonn. Twitter: @florlopezboo

Belén Michel Torino

Belén Michel Torino is part of the coordinating team of the Early Childhood Development Innovation Fund, an initiative of the Education and the Social Protection and Health divisions of the IDB. She has worked in evaluation and monitoring of social protection and education programs at the World Bank, the international organization for migration (UN-IOM), the national administration of social security in Argentina (ANSES) and the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires City. She is a PhD candidate in economics (Universidad de San Andrés) and holds master's degrees in Economics (Universidad Nacional de La Plata) and in Computational Analysis and Public Policies (University of Chicago).

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Early Childhood Development

The first years of life are essential to establish the future foundation of a person´s productivity and wellbeing. In this blog, experts from the IDB and thought leaders in the topic, share information and international experiences related to early childhood development. Join us to talk about initiatives implemented in your country in this area

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