CEDEC
The Chicago Initiative for Economic Development and Early Childhood (CEDEC) is a network of researchers, policymakers and development organizations dedicated to improving the quality of early childhood interventions in developing countries.
CEDEC is an interdisciplinary initiative born at the University of Chicago from a critical mass of students and faculty working to understand what shapes early childhood development. Launched in Fall 2010, the Initiative is rapidly expanding its network, and is organizing a conference to be held at the University of Chicago on April 20-21, 2012.
2012 Conference
April 20th and 21st
The Divinity School
The University of Chicago
You can register to attend the conference by clicking HERE
Mission
CEDEC’s mission is to build a bridge between leading researchers and policymakers in order to synthesize, disseminate and implement state-of-the-art knowledge of early childhood development, particularly in the context of developing countries. In this way, we hope to contribute to attempts to break the vicious cycle of poverty and inequality created in the early years of life.
Three principles guide the Initiative: First, the expansion of our knowledge can best be achieved through rigorous research. Second, the formation of capabilities in early childhood can only be properly understood from a multidisciplinary perspective. Finally, the exchange of ideas regarding specific interventions should go beyond identifying what works to understanding why different policies work, as this will inform the effective design of policies in different contexts.
CEDEC will work to achieve its mission by:
• Promoting recent multidisciplinary advances in understanding how capabilities are produced during pregnancy and early childhood.
• Linking researchers and policymakers to facilitate the design, implementation, and rigorous evaluation of policies that incorporate these advances.
• Contributing to the creation of knowledge in the area of early childhood development that explicitly addresses the needs and constraints of developing countries.
Why CEDEC?
Evidence of the crucial importance of early childhood on the development of human capabilities is growing by the day. The importance of investment in early years stems from the dynamic nature of skills formation: skills beget skills, which implies that returns on early investment are multiplicative. Building strong capabilities early in life makes later learning and development more productive. Nevertheless, there are a lot of areas where our understanding is lacking and there is a wide gap between what is known in the academic community and what policy makers do, particularly in developing countries.
Convincing evidence concerning Early Childhood Development (ECD) comes, for the most part, from interventions analyzed in developed countries. US experimental studies targeting disadvantaged children, which aim to enhance family environment and promote early learning and school readiness, show positive effects on health outcomes, as well as both cognitive and in particular, non-cognitive abilities. These positive effects extend into adolescence and adulthood, fostering school attainment, increasing labor participation and productivity, and reducing crime and other anti-social behavior.
While the processes and the theoretical framework behind early childhood development are the same for all human beings, the different environments and resource constraints in developing countries call for context-specific research and knowledge. Low-income children in developing countries face severe problems of malnutrition, stunting, school dropout and retention, and poor physical and mental health. Interventions in developing countries are diverse and include nutrition, prenatal care, pre-school education, parenting, cash transfers, and childcare. However, solid evidence of the way in which these policies interact with each other and with the environment is still missing. Some challenges to improving the quality of early childhood interventions, particularly in the context of developing countries, include: i) extending lessons learned from ECD interventions to other regions (i.e., from developed as well as from other developing regions); ii) effectively adapting ECD policies that have proved successful in other contexts; and iii) establishing adequate evaluation and monitoring systems to learn what works and under which circumstances.
Contact Information
The Harris School of Public Policy
1155 East 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
E-mail: cedec@uchicago.edu
