University of Harvard Free Online Course Early Childhood Development

Examine best practices in child and family policies, advocacy, financing, and pathways to scale.

What you’ll learn

• Gain knowledge about the state of the science on effective interventions for early childhood development.
• Learn what makes programs successful around the world in supporting early childhood development and why some programs fail.
• Reflect on changes for your program, becoming familiar with the steps to design successful interventions that support early childhood development and understand what services you need to prioritize.
• Explore strategies to enable widespread adaptation of quality programming and evaluate the effectiveness of your programming.

Course description

How can we ensure that we don’t fail the next generation of children? What investments do we need to make an impact? What implementation decisions do we need to make for program success?

An estimated 250 million children in low- and middle-income countries risk not meeting their development potential in the first five years of life—leading to lifelong impacts on health, learning, behavior, and overall adult productivity. During this critical time, strategic interventions can ensure children have a strong foundation to lead healthy, productive lives as engaged citizens.

There is an urgent need to increase access to high-quality early childhood development intervention programs on national and global scales. While the science behind the importance of early development and funding for these programs has increased globally, policy development, research, and implementation best practices have not been widely adopted. As the COVID-19 virus disrupts health, nutrition, childcare, and education services, and stretches social and child protection systems to their limits, children and families least able to cope are being hit hardest with inequities in childhood development widening. Evidence-based policies that support families and young children are needed now more than ever. This course examines best practices in child and family policies, advocacy, financing, and pathways to scale—showing you how to generate an innovative, scalable intervention strategy that supports early childhood development.

The course begins with a review of basic early childhood development concepts and successful implementation programs around the world. We learn why some programs succeed where others do less well and what strategies are key for enabling widespread adaptation of quality programming. For those working around the world in early childhood development programs, this course allows you to reflect and evaluate your own organization by reviewing real-world case successes, as well as a new global perspective from other learners. You will complete the course with new plans and ideas ready to implement within your program.

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