Early Years Count – Uganda was founded to contribute towards drawing the most needed attention to the young children in Uganda, to build demand and awareness on the importance of these years towards the sustainable development of Uganda, especially by targeting the most vulnerable families, to support efforts towards ensuring a fair start for young children from conception to eight years and ensuring that families understand the window of opportunity that these years provide for them and their children.

Basing its evolution on perceived needs in the sector, it places priority on addressing the issues outlined above, with particular emphasis on finding mechanisms for provision that will shift delivery significantly, enabling ECD provision to take an elevated position. Over the next couple of years, EYC will go through this process at an increased tempo and depth of engagement. Great attention will be given to activating and fine-tuning details of the program which enable it to implement activities. The interventions will offer increased access to quality ECD while generating an increase in demand for ECD at community level.

Early Years Count seeks to strengthen information on Early Childhood Development to inspire action. EYC will enable policy makers as well as the public to become aware of the early years and build on that awareness to stimulate policy change and investments at all levels for early childhood development. The ultimate success of EYC depends on our ability to trigger critical actions and debate, that in turn will stimulate key actors to make the policy and programmatic changes necessary to improve the lives of young children in Uganda.

It also strives to ensure accountability for ECD services, increase research and foster national leadership and action. Accountability is essential to strengthen coordination of ECD services including through improved data collection, analysis and action as a key element of accountability.

Building an effective data system for early childhood is a key challenge as data systems need to cut across multiple sectors such as health, nutrition, child protection and education. EYC will utilize the sectoral information and data systems to build a regular comprehensive national snapshot of the situation of young children. More importantly, EYC’s special addition to the data for ECD is how it informs policy and practice and how it can be used to make improvements. Early Years Count works towards developing data systems for Early Childhood that include a broader and more comprehensive view of early childhood development pulling together key indicators from a range of sectors, and having coordinated data system.

Early Years Count also works to reach the most disadvantaged families and communities with a package of quality ECD services with a focus on the nurturing care framework components starting with the first 1000 days, the zero to three age group and support towards school readiness by engaging parents and communities to lead such efforts in informal, culturally contextualized ways.

This work plan therefore details the key activities that EYC will focus on over the next one and a half years.