In Colombia, the national law De Cero a Siempre (DCAS) provides a framework for holistic and integrated early childhood development and education for all children. Against the backdrop of the United Nations’Sustainable Development Goals and the DCAS policy objectives, Colombia set out to apply a comprehensive measure to track the quality of early childhood education programs that would inform pedagogical, programmatic, and policy strategies. Our study describes the process whereby key stakeholders selected, adapted, validated, and applied the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) framework to characterize the quality of early childhood education at scale in the country. We describe the phases that led to the application of the different instrument modules, and the key enablers and challenges to the process. The paper includes implications for policy, practice, and research in Colombia and discusses lessons learned with relevance to the Latin American and global contexts.

What does a successful early childhood care program look like? How has a child’s brain developed at the age of 3? How does nutrition impact the future well-being of a child into adulthood? Learn the answers to these questions and more in "The Best Start in Life: Early Childhood Development for Sustainable Development". With leading experts in the field – hailing from Harvard University, New York University and UNICEF, among other institutions – we’ll explore how neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and other studies have influenced our understanding of early childhood development.

While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process.

This chapter discusses the roles of transnational multiple stakeholder partnerships in addressing development and implementation challenges affecting youth and children in both rich as well as low- and middle-income countries. We first discuss each of five major sets of stakeholders –national governments; community members; civil society organizations; the private sector; and researchers – in terms of their stakes in working towards SDG progress. Then we present how networks across these groups (e.g. at national, regional and global levels, or Multiple Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs), can help achieve progress, with several current examples. Throughout we balance discussion of challenges, strengths and opportunities in both individual stakeholder approaches and MSPs. We also place special emphasis on the role of research in general and developmental science in particular, in the work of MSPs on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The EQUAL (Education Quality and Learning for All) Network for Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to identify and develop research networks, provide seed grants and increase research-practice partnerships in two regions of the world affected by the learning crisis – the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). EQUAL is capacity building of networks of scholars so that the evidence bases in measurement and evaluation relevant to the lifelong learning goal of the SDGs is advanced at the country level and across countries within the two regions.

In September 2016, the member states of the United Nations completed the process of adopting and defining indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; United Nations, 2015). Developed through a three-year, worldwide participatory process, these 17 goals and 169 targets represent a global consensus on the part of U.N. member nations towards an inclusive, sustainable world, centered around ensuring equity in all countries at a time of great environmental and humanitarian crises. This Social Policy Report describes the central role of supporting child and youth development in achieving the vision behind the U.N. Sustainable Development Agenda. The report then addresses the importance of developmental science in achieving the aims of the Sustainable Development Agenda through generating knowledge of child and youth development in diverse contexts, monitoring and measurement to reveal patterns of success and inequity, and building capacity for developmental science in all countries. We emphasize the goal that most clearly encompasses development from birth to young adulthood (SDG 4) and also describe the relevance of developmental science to the other goals.