The Twelve Who Survive: Strengthening Programs of Early Childhood Development in the Third World
Myers, Robert (1992).
London: Routledge; 468 pages. $45.00. ISBN 0415073073.
Bob Myers' The Twelve Who Survive defies the conventional wisdom on child development in Third World countries. When he wrote the book, Myers was housed within, and heavily supported by, UNICEF, the prime international body committed to global child welfare. Yet, his book poses fundamental questions about a strategy that built UNICEF's reputation and budget at a time when the reputation of multilateral development agencies was deteriorating profoundly. This strategy demanded the concentration of UNICEF's resources, and those of other agencies influenced by UNICEF's forceful advocacy, on programs of so-called Child Survival.
When UNICEF focused its programs in this way, it earned itself a hard-nosed, goals-oriented reputation which distinguished it from its peers. UNICEF funding was targeted on a narrow age range, essentially the child in early infancy and on a set of low-cost, feasible technologies: growth monitoring, oral rehydration, breast-feeding and immunization.
This concentrated effort by UNICEF did much to preserve the lives of millions of young children in the world's poorest countries. Where the UNICEF strategy can be validly criticized is precisely where Myers directs his attention: what happens to the 12 (out of 13) children who survive? UNICEF's well-oiled information machine paid little attention to the measures needed to ensure that children who survive should also thrive. There is, especially in the countries on which Myers concentrates, a long and difficult trail between infancy and enrollment in elementary school (assuming there is one). This book sheds light on how poor countries, families and communities have sought to bridge that gap, largely through their own efforts, and provide organized programs of early childhood development.
The development industry often tends to be a story of one or other “solution,' frequently the product of western science, which purports to solve endemic problems of the Third World. Myers directs attention in another direction, towards the importance of understanding indigenous ways of caring for young children and transforming these ways, through the efforts of local people, into genuine, locally owned, locally implemented, developmental childcare systems.
Moreover, in the United States, we are witnessing the failure of highly capitalized systems for promoting the care and development of young children. In many U.S. cities, statistics reveal living conditions for young children that are in every respect comparable to the Third World. In the context of this failure, Myers points to ways in which Third World communities have organized around the childcare issue and generated services that benefit both the children concerned and the communities themselves. Similarly, from the experiences he reviews, he draws a lesson that is self-evident in many countries in the developing world, but that is elsewhere still regarded as extraordinary -that children's needs are not fragmented and treatable in self-contained, professionally defined compartments. On the contrary, they are indivisible, part of a whole, and need to be addressed in comprehensive fashion.
India's 20-year-old Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) illustrates the point. Conceived as a child-feeding program, ICDS pragmatically responded to the fact that hungry children gather in advance around the feeding center, that they are accompanied by mothers or older brothers and sisters, and that this presents an opportunity for health education, hygiene and child stimulation as well as direct feeding. The result is a comprehensive child development program directed at the country's poorest, which touches more than 11 million children. It may not be state of the art according to the latest development psychologists, but it is a functional service for the mass of India's preschool children.
Myers documents many such examples. In addition, he pushes the frontier of 'state of the practice' beyond what had, in the past, been conventionally regarded as early childhood development provision. In many developing countries, the problem traditionally has not been lack of willingness to establish basic services for the under-fives. It has been simple lack of resources coupled with an unchallengeable commitment to the conventional education system, with its associated high cost patterns. The most radical way of addressing the needs of preschool children has been through abandoning the conventional apparatus of concrete construction and the paraphernalia of group play. Instead, several efforts have been mounted to change the practice in the home of care-givers and parents. This again implies attention to the range of children's needs -health, hygiene, nutrition, affection and stimulation. It also demands many technical competencies on the part of the home-visiting childcare worker, and above all, an ability, rare among pedagogues around the world, to infiltrate the home environment in order to convey subtly the set of ideas needed to reinforce children's early development.
It is on this aspect that Myers might be open to criticism. He has the economist's concern for systems and 'scale,' as if the fact of providing a service in itself constitutes the answer to a problem. In this respect, Myers almost falls for the same numbers game for which he rightly criticizes UNICEF's Child Survival program. It has been shown that good advocacy, whether with national governments (India, Kenya) or with the big international agencies (the World Bank, and even a few deviants in UNICEF) can generate programs on paper. It can at least convince governments that are still sniffing the wind that provision of early childhood care is a community priority in an era of ever more working women which governments ignore at their peril. But advocacy cannot produce program quality. It cannot therefore of itself generate an answer to the Myers' question- what happens to the 12 who survive? More crucially, it cannot answer the follow-up question- how can low cost and high quality in programs be balanced?
And yet, within the large sweep of programs that Myers reviews, the answer rests. In those instances where programs pay attention to building leadership skills and basic pedagogical awareness in those who delivered ECD services, whether home or community based, there is a marked difference in program quality and in the durability of innovative work. In those cases that were launched with the now unfashionable small-scale pilot, which adjusted operating styles in the light of experience, stronger outcomes for children, parents, and communities can be perceived and the move to scale is more defensible (e.g. the Choco and La Playa programs in Colombia; the CCSC program in Georgia, U.S.A.). This of course demands a slower, more reflective operating style than most administrations can tolerate these days. And it also demands of funders more willingness to take risks, to allow mistakes to occur, to stand by patiently while the mysterious 'capacity' is built. The relative down-playing of training, staff development, and capacity-building is perhaps the one spot in this ice-breaking work that is open to criticism.
But, in general, this work is a signal contribution to a neglected area in studies of Third World development. It catalogs and analyzes a diverse range of programs that deal with the child and parent in the years before school. It puts forward a powerful and reasoned case for investment in the preschool years. It couches the case not only, as conventionally viewed, in terms of preparing children for school, but looks beyond this argument to a wider and more radical set of arguments. Not only does investment in well-conceived, community-based, early childhood education programs benefit the child in sundry ways, including health, nutrition, intellectual, development, but because of its community-based nature, it draws community people into the work. They may bring to this work little in terms of conventional education, by their involvement, contributing positively to improving their children's lives, has a reciprocal effect on their own development, which in turn has a series of positive social repercussions. The Twelve Who Survive touches on these potent spill-over effects.
In answering the question, 'after survival- what?' Bob Myers sheds light on a rich array of early childhood programs that draw on the community and that in turn become motivators of change in the community. Here the book breaks new ground and does a service to all concerned with thinking and practice in education in the developing world.
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