Welcome to the PATH early childhood development knowledge hub
From 2012 to 2024, PATH and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation partnered to support the Ministries of Health in Mozambique and Kenya to design and pilot health system interventions that promote optimal development for young children.
Along the journey, other partners and donors joined this endeavor and Mozambique and Kenya became learning hubs for promoting early childhood development in the health sector. Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, and Malawi have subsequently adapted materials and approaches tried and tested in Mozambique and Kenya to their context.
Interventions supported by PATH are focused on pregnancy through the first three years of life. That is where the health system comes into play, from antenatal care to child health, nutrition, and immunization services. These health service touchpoints have untapped potential for promoting nurturing care for early childhood development (ECD).
Working side by side with government, we have achieved many successes, grappled with challenges inherent to health systems, and learned many lessons over the past 10+ years. We couldn’t be happier to have established a permanent platform to share the results and products of this work with the larger nurturing care community. In addition to tools, training materials, and implementation science results from Mozambique and Kenya, we have also made available the materials that PATH provided direct technical assistance to in Ethiopia, through partnerships with the Ethiopia Federal Ministry of Health, Big Win Philanthropy, and The Bainum Family Foundation.
Explore our resources on early childhood development
This knowledge hub is both for policymakers and implementers. We share national and subnational health and nutrition policies, strategies, plans, and guidelines that integrate ECD. These are living examples of how relevant content from the Nurturing Care Framework for ECD can be integrated into existing normative documents when dedicated technical assistance is available. Finally, where evidence or testimonies exist on how these materials were put to use and with what results, these are presented alongside the resources. Some of these assessments are formative and small in scope, so the tools may require additional testing. We invite partners to critically engage with the relevant tools, get inspired by them, adapt them to their realities, and generate more rigorous evidence of their effectiveness.
Most of the materials shared here, however, are more practical in nature. These are job aids, training manuals, and quality improvement tools inspired by global packages, such as Care for Child Development and Thinking Healthy. They have been subject to several rounds of iteration, including through human centered design, to fit the realities of health systems in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Finally, evidence or testimonies on how these materials were put to use and their results are presented alongside the resources. Some of these assessments are formative and small in scope, so the tools may require additional testing. We invite partners to critically engage with the relevant tools, get inspired by them, adapt them to their realities, and generate more rigorous evidence of their effectiveness.
Resources by topic
Explore resources by relevant topics. Click any of the items to view our available resources.
Resources by type
Looking for a specific type of resource? Click any item to view specific types of resources.
Government Policies
Sectoral Technical Guidelines
Job Aids
Capacity Building Tools
Evidence Base
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Our partners
The design, implementation and assessments of the ECD interventions and tools presented here have been generously supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, UNICEF Mozambique, the Bainum Family Foundation, Big Win Philanthropy, and USAID.