Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing short profiles of the 20 scholars participating in LEARN, a global community of researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of early childhood development, systems change, and social justice. Every two weeks, we’ll spotlight one scholar’s path, questions, and work on the ground.

We’re pleased to kick off the series with Paola Balanta Cobo Mag. Psic - PhD, a Senior Interdisciplinary Researcher in Human Development, Education, and Rights and the field leader for the JUNTOS por la Prioridad Program in Colombia, a collaborative initiative focused on strengthening care systems and positioning early childhood development as a national and local priority.

Paola’s path into research was intentional and deeply rooted in lived experience. From an early age, she worked alongside families, children, and young people in communities shaped by inequality and armed conflict. Those experiences continue to inform the questions that drive her work today: how agency, resilience, and creativity are nurtured in vulnerable contexts.

Her research is intergenerational in nature and strongly emphasizes the promotion of exchange between youth, early childhood, and the pedagogical practices that exist at the intersection of institutional contexts. It sits at the intersection of psychology, education, and social justice - transforming everyday care and creativity into eco-pedagogies and community initiatives grounded in local resources, intergenerational relationships, and emotional co-regulation.

In our conversation, Paola reflects on how these early experiences shaped her research agenda and how they continue to guide her commitment to early childhood development and systems-level change.

An estimated 12 million girls aged 15–19 years, and 777,000 girls younger than 15 give birth globally each year. Contexts of war and displacement increase the likelihood of early marriage and childbearing. Given the developmentally sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence, adolescent motherhood in conflict-affected contexts may put a family at risk intergenerationally. We propose that the specifics of normative neuroendocrine development during adolescence, including increased sensitivity to stress, pose additional risks to adolescent girls and their young children in the face of war and displacement, with potential lifelong consequences for health and development. This paper proposes a developmental, dual-generational framework for research and policies to better understand and address the needs of adolescent mothers and their small children. We draw from the literature on developmental stress physiology, adolescent parenthood in contexts of war and displacement internationally, and developmental cultural neurobiology. We also identify culturally meaningful sources of resilience and provide a review of the existing literature on interventions supporting adolescent mothers and their offspring. We aim to honor Edward Zigler's groundbreaking life and career by integrating basic developmental science with applied intervention and policy.

An unprecedented half of the world’s 57 million out of school children live in conflict-affected countries, and 50% of children of primary-school-age are not attending school. In addition, the unauthorized status of many refugees and migrants worldwide is associated with experiences of social exclusion as access to employment and social services are often unavailable or constrained by host-country governments. Children and youth affected by unauthorized or refugee status are also often excluded from services to support healthy development and learning. This chapter presents a process-oriented developmental framework to guide the development and evaluation of interventions that can buffer the effects of social and political upheaval, displacement, and refugee and unauthorized status on children and youth's development. Rigorous evaluations, showing how programs mitigate the risks of displacement or refugee or unauthorized status, could yield great benefits for the fields of humanitarian aid and refugee and migration policy, making the relative dearth of such evidence even more stunning. This chapter reviews the existing literature from rigorous evaluations of interventions to address these issues, discusses the challenge of measurement of risk and protective factors in these contexts with particular sensitivity to cultural variation, as well as how to address cultural factors in the development and evaluation of interventions. The chapter concludes with specific methodological recommendations for a sound research agenda to further improve our understanding of risk and resilience in development of children and youth affected by war, displacement, and refugee or unauthorized status.

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.