Reaching Out to the Child : An Integrated Approach to Child Development
While India has, over the last few decades, made considerable progress in ensuring child survival and basic education, much remains to be done. When the major indicators for the Indian child's development -- maternal mortality, birth weight, i...
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| Format: | Other Education Study |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/06/5038553/reaching-out-child-integrated-approach-child-development http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15686 |
| Summary: | While India has, over the last few
decades, made considerable progress in ensuring child
survival and basic education, much remains to be done. When
the major indicators for the Indian child's development
-- maternal mortality, birth weight, immunization, nutrition
level and basic education - are compared with those of other
developing countries, it is clear that the Indian child
urgently needs better interventions. In the context of such
a situation, the vision for the future has to be an India
where all children have all the chances they need for
optimal development. The emerging question is, despite
significant investments and a conducive policy framework,
why is the status of the Indian child still far from
satisfactory? And, what then is the way forward to realize
this vision? It was in this context that a multi-sectoral
workshop entitled "Reaching Out to the Child" was
organized collaboratively by the Education and Health,
Nutrition and Population teams of the World Bank on February
21 and 22, 2000 with the participation of Indian
professionals from health, nutrition and education sectors;
and senior representatives of the Departments of Health,
Education, and Women and Child Development (WCD). The
objective of the workshop was to initiate multi-sectoral
discussions across the government and non-government sectors
with the aim of establishing a constituency for the
development of an integrated, comprehensive and convergent
approach to child development. This report synthesizes the
observations and conclusions from the five studies and the
deliberations of the seminar, supplemented by review of
other relevant documentation. The starting point of this
report's conceptual framework is the premise that the
child's development must be viewed along the prenatal
to11+ age continuum as a continuous and cumulative process.
Investment and intervention have to take into account every
sub-stage of the child's development process, from
conception through the years of growth to enable the child
at 11+ years to reach the basic milestone of successful
completion of primary school. Moreover, intervention must
account for the dynamic, interactive relationship among the
sub-stages of development; among sectors such as health,
nutrition and education; and among aspects such as maternal
health, psychosocial development, and family and community
environments. The continuous and cumulative nature of impact
has also meant that the impact of not attaining appropriate
developmental milestones, or health and nutritional
outcomes, or learning capacities, will accompany the child
to the next stage. In some cases, "cumulative"
failure is the result of an inter-generational transfer of
handicaps, and the accompanying downward spiral of poverty,
ill health, malnutrition, and poor learning outcomes for
children. For the purposes of the quantitative and
qualitative data studies conducted for this report, the
framework underlined the critical and reciprocal link
between health and education, specifically in relation to
children, whereby poor health and nutrition work as barriers
to attendance and educational attainment/achievement. The
family, the community, the state, service delivery
mechanisms, and the presence of non-governmental
organizations, all play important mediating roles and
further fragment the experience at the grassroots. |
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