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| AUTHOR | Leslyn Thompson, Audrey Rodrigues, Dennis Arends, Heather Stewart, Niloufar Pourzand and Rene Van Dongen |
| ORGANIZATION | UNICEF |
| TYPE | Working Paper |
| DATE | 2007 |
| TOPIC | Child-sensitive social protection |
| LANGUAGE | English |
Evidence suggests that pre-primary education substantially improves a child’s ability to make the transition into compulsory primary and secondary schooling and continues to positively impact a child’s development into adolescence and adulthood. This paper discusses and analyses viable policy options to scale up access to quality early childhood education in Guyana, Suriname and St. Lucia with a special focus on the reduction of disparities between different geographical locations and socio-economic groups in those countries. Children from certain marginalized areas of these countries fail to attend pre-primary school because care-givers aren’t aware of its importance and because of the high cost in terms of cash output, time and effort. This paper offers a plan in which each child would receive at least three hours of pre-primary education with a qualified teacher as a simple, affordable policy option to initiate the process of scaling up a quality pre-primary education system.
