The Special Meeting of the OAS Permanent Council and the Permanent Executive Committee of the Inter – American Council for integral Development on the importance of investing in early childhood for the development of the region is taking place today Under the title “Investing in early childhood: a sure strategy for combating poverty and for promoting social development and equity”.

The meeting, hat started at 10:00 am. And will go on until 1.00 pm, is divided in three panels in which top experts will expose about Why invest in early Childhood and the Promotion of Social Development and Equity.

The purpose of the Inter-American Program on Comprehensive Attention to Early Childhood is to consolidate and make further headway on fulfilling the Hemispheric Commitment to Early Childhood Education adopted in 2007 and ratified by the Ministers of Education of the Americas in August 2009.  The program works to promote the activities, projects and technical assistance that the OAS, UNICEF and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation are sponsoring, heading up and executing within the hemisphere, in partnership with government institutions, civil society and businesses.

Early childhood is a critical phase in the life of every human being, and the investment made in quality comprehensive care in this decisive phase of life is an opportunity to conquer or mitigate some of the major challenges that the OAS member states face:  chronic poverty, inequality, an elevated school dropout rate, nagging unemployment, crime and social violence.  Affording all the children in our countries a good start is one of the keys to shaping and developing human beings capable of living together in society as affective, cognitive, communicative and creative individuals.   A veritable chorus of economists, scientists, physicians and policy-makers have concluded that the investment in attention to early childhood is perhaps the most important that a society can make to induce the most positive social and economic results.  The research also finds that to be effective, the attention administered in early childhood must be of good quality and comprehensive; in other words, it must involve a variety of strategically articulated services in areas like nutrition, health, education, welfare, labor measures, etc., all in order to actually achieve an optimum, equitable impact.  This kind of comprehensive attention requires discerning public policy, which in turn demands enormous political commitment, especially in times of economic crisis and political change.

The early Childhood Development Secretariat for Latin America and the Caribbean, founded by ALAS and the earth Institute at Columbia University, is represented by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the EI and cofounder of the Secretariat, who will be approaching the audience of ambassadors and Latin American delegations to the OAS about the importance of investing in early childhood for the social and economical development of the region. Maria Estela Ortiz, Vice president of the Board of Chilean Kindergartens and Chile’s delegate for the Secretariat, will speak about how to promote social equity and development since early childhood development.

Watch the complete livestream in http://www.oas.org/en/media_center/webcast.asp?lang=ORI