The need for nurture
Helping disadvantaged children before it's too late was the subject of a regional conference held in Cairo this week. Amira El-Noshokaty attended
At a regional conference held in Cairo this week, experts discussed the dire need for Arab states to improve their Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policies and practices. Held under the auspices of Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, the event was jointly organised by the National Council of Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organisations (AGFUND) and the Egyptian National Commission for UNESCO.
NCCM Secretary-General Moushira Khattab told Al- Ahram Weekly that, "if you nurture a child from a very early age, the child will make the best of any opportunities available to him/her." Taking disadvantaged and marginalised children as examples, Khattab explained that when such children are involved in early childhood development programmes, they will usually manage to avoid the child labour market, girls will not marry at an excessively early age, and negative phenomena like street children can be eliminated.
Higher Education and Scientific Research Minister Moufid Shehab, who also heads the Egyptian National Commission for UNESCO, emphasised -- in his opening speech -- the importance of ECCE and its impact on children's futures. "The wealth of a nation is now measured by its manpower," Shehab said.
The conference was also meant to review the progress that had been made towards improving the lives of children and young people since the 1990 World Summit for Children. ECCE targets children up to the age of eight, as well as their parents, by aiming to integrate a child's holistic development into basic education programmes. Palestine, Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt were among the various Arab countries represented at the conference; each elaborated on their ECCE experiences.
Mona Gad, a Cairo University children's education professor, presented the conference with a paper detailing the number of pre-school students in Arab countries. Kuwait ranked the highest in this regard, with a 97.7 pre- school enrollment in 1999. Although Egypt ranked tenth -- at 12.5 per cent -- the World Bank has indicated that the Egyptian Ministry of Education's plan is to increase that to 65 per cent by 2010.
Khattab said her organisation was working "on two levels". The first involved setting up an action plan with the cooperation of the Health, Education, and Social Affairs ministries, as well as relevant NGOs. That plan, Khattab said, is now included in the component on childhood and motherhood development in Egypt's current five year plan, which began this year.
NCCM's role, meanwhile, is to create pilot projects, which include training teachers, nursery and kindergarten supervisors, as well as parents. Khattab called it "a multidisciplinary approach, because when dealing with early childhood development, one cannot concentrate on only one aspect. Health, education, culture and social aspects are taken into consideration."
According to Hoda El- Tahawi, who heads the NCCM's development and gender unit, an ECCE pilot project has been implemented in several Upper Egyptian villages. Although the project went well, El- Tahawi said, much more needs to be done, with the collaboration and support of the Egyptian government. She said the goal was to implement projects nationwide, as part of the second Egyptian Children's Decade (2000- 2010). 1990-2000 was the first such designated decade.
"We hope the outcome of this conference will be a national unified pre-school curriculum which can be incorporated within the framework of the already existing Arab action plan," Khattab said.
Recent statistics released by the Arab Council for Childhood and Development indicate that 46.7 per cent of the Arab world's 280 million inhabitants are under the age of 18. 16.6 per cent are under the age of six.
