LAUSR

For the third time in a decade, after Series in 2007 and 2011, The Lancet has published a Series on the global status of early childhood development. Building on the explicit attention to the early years of life included in the Sustainable Development Goals, the time is ripe to take stock of how much has been accomplished in the past 10 years and identify priorities for accelerated progress in the decades to come. This new Lancet Series, Advancing Early Childhood Development Series: from Science to Scale, refl ects the power and future possibilities of a growing knowledge base. The science of early childhood development and its underlying neurobiology are increasingly invoked in the global discourse on education, health, social and child protection, and human capital formation. This science provides a powerful framework for understanding how development happens, how it can be derailed, and how to get it back on track when it is disrupted. Advances in the biology of adversity have also helped make a strong case for directing more resources towards evidence presented in this Series makes it clear that this situation must change. This Series adds new insights about the importance of early childhood development at every stage of a child’s life from before conception throughout the life course. When early childhood development stalls, there are critical mitigation interventions across health, nutrition, education, child protection, and social protection sectors that should be accessible to all families and young children. And yet we continue to see an overemphasis on policies and programmes for school readiness at the expense of holistic interventions through the life course, particularly in the fi rst 1000 days of a child’s life. If we are to make progress in turning science into practice, policies and programmes need to take a life-course approach and resource allocation must follow suit. The delivery of early childhood development services cannot be fragmented across diff erent sectors, but should be provided as integrated, multisectoral evidence-based interventions. This Series highlights the importance of a life-course approach and greater integration of the health sector with other sectors, such as nutrition, education, child protection, social protection, and water and sanitation, bringing together multistakeholder partners and combining innovative fi nancing and accountability mechanisms to help achieve the SDGs. Political will is essential to advance early childhood development in this way. Investing in early childhood development, integrated with basic family and child health and nutrition, and doing so early, will see individuals and nations overcome poverty and exclusion and progress towards their development goals. All stakeholders must refl ect on how seriously they take the cost of inaction. Through the Global Strategy and its accountability framework, all partners are urged to improve early childhood development and be accountable in their national plans. It is up to all stakeholders to make sure we reach the goals of the Global Strategy and the SDGs. This entails careful planning, execution, and monitoring so that no one is left behind, and it requires unprecedented human and fi nancial resources for implementation. We can mobilise these resources by adopting a partnership model that is country led and co-opts the expertise and resources of stakeholders from across multiple sectors.