Adanech Abiebie, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, is determined to make Addis “the best city in Africa to raise children.”
Creating a better life for women and families had long been a personal priority for Mayor Adanech, but she sees Early Childhood Development through a broader lens. “I think that investing in early childhood is the best way to achieve long-term transformation and to make the people of Addis prosperous. I believe that it is a strategic node to break the vicious circle of poverty.”
The Early Childhood Development program Mayor Adanech launched, “Children: The Future Hope of Addis Ababa,” seeks to meet the global norm of 95% of children aged 0-6 being developmentally on track – which would be a nearly two-fold improvement from the baseline conducted at the program’s outset. Although the program targets all the approximately 1.3 million children in Addis, it provides intensified support to 330,000 low-income households.
In Addis, Early Childhood Development does not just mean pre-schools. The backbone of the initiative is a corps of 5,000 trained parental coaches who make regular visits at the household level to work with parents and to evaluate children’s achievement of developmental milestones. The program also tries to incorporate a nurturing care framework into all the city’s touchpoints with young children; seeks to build thousands of playgrounds and plant 100,000 trees; puts play spaces in every health center; and incorporates early childhood milestones into health check-ups. Daycares and pre-primary schools are being transformed to focus their curricula on holistic development, but much of the work occurs outside of school settings.
Not every intervention is expensive, either: One of the mayor’s first decisions was to close major streets on weekend mornings so that children and families could play while the city’s team provides parenting support, which has quickly become a popular ritual.
Mayor Adanech’s passion for Early Childhood Development has been catalytic throughout Ethiopia. The federal government has made Early Childhood Development a national priority, and five other regions are drawing on Addis’s experience as they build out their own programs. The city has also leaned into its role as the “capital of Africa” by creating the African Center for Early Childhood Development to share learnings, disseminate best practices, and serve as a knowledge hub for the continent.
