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One-third of young children in LMICs fail to meet developmental potential
Recent research in PLoS Medicine reported that a significant proportion of children aged 3 to 4 years in low- and middle-income countries failed to meet socioemotional and cognitive development benchmarks.
“The early years of life are critical for children’s development of foundational cognitive and socioemotional characteristics,” Dana Charles McCoy, PhD, of the department of global health and population at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, and colleagues wrote. “Our results suggest that approximately one-third of all 3- and 4-year-old children in [low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)] were failing to meet basic cognitive and/or socioemotional milestones in 2010.”
Dana Charles McCoy
The researchers studied caregiver reports for 99,222 children aged 3 to 4 years from 2005 to 2015. The reports used the Early Childhood Development Index to gauge the developmental status of children from 35 LMICs. The prevalence of low cognitive and socioemotional scores for country was estimated using statistical analysis.
McCoy and colleagues found that an estimated 14.6% of children in these 35 LMICs had low cognitive development scores, while 26.6% had low socioeconomic skills.
When extrapolated to all LMICs, the data suggested that an estimated 32.9%, or 80.8 million, of children aged 3 and 4 years do not meet basic cognitive and socioemotional benchmarks. Furthermore, the researchers found that an additional 16.7% of children who do well with emotional and socioemotional development, instead experience stunted physical growth.
Study results showed that the countries with the highest prevalence of low cognitive and socioemotional scores were: Chad (67%), Sierra Leone (54.3%), the Central African Republic (54.1%), Cameroon (53.1%) and the Congo (49%). Conversely, the countries that fared the best, with the lowest prevalence of cognitive and socioemotional deficits were Montenegro (4.3%), Bosnia (4.4%), Serbia (4.9%), Macedonia (8.9%) and Saint Lucia (11%).
“As the international community looks toward a post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal agenda that will inevitably focus on improving young children’s ability to learn and thrive, future efforts must identify additional cost-effective approaches for helping children to achieve their developmental potential, as well as ways to most effectively combine these approaches, ensure their sustainability, and take them to scale,” McCoy and colleagues wrote. – by David Costill
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
