Goal 3: Measuring Early Childhood Development

Regional Agenda for Early Childhood Development: Measuring Early Childhood Development

Advance new mechanisms to measure early childhood development that take into account different dimensions of child development (i.e., physical, cognitive) and allow countries to monitor changes over time. These measurement mechanisms should have national coverage and allow countries to disaggregate data according to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographic area, gender or other demographic indicators.

For this purpose, countries must develop national early childhood development surveys grounded on a solid institutional framework, that ensure that data collection and analysis inform early childhood development policies. Ideally, countries’ ECD measurement systems should allow for international comparisons, particularly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Regional Network to Measure Childhood Development (REMDI)

REMDI (for its acronym in Spanish) is a regional network of specialists that seeks to promote and facilitate current and future surveying and measuring efforts so that all Latin American and Caribbean countries have clear, technically sound mechanisms for evaluating childhood development at the national level.

The main objective of the network is to promote a common approach in the region for measuring early childhood development, involving regular and periodic national childhood development surveys. As a result, the approach allows for comparisons between countries and population subgroups within them, making it possible diagnoses that guide early childhood policies in the region.

As a regional network, REMDI includes representatives from the Inter-American Dialogue and of early childhood programs from the governments of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, Dominican Republic and El Salvador.

More about REMDI