By Aanchal Kapur, Education Policy and Systems Researcher
In humanitarian and conflict-affected contexts, early childhood education is often among the first areas to be cut or postponed when education budgets are constrained.
These decisions are typically framed as temporary compromises made under pressure, a way to prioritise ‘core’ schooling until systems stabilize. Evidence suggests, however, that their effects are neither short-lived nor marginal. Learning gaps that emerge before children enter primary school tend to persist across later grades and shape how education systems perform and recover.
Weak school readiness, widening learning gaps in the early grades, rising remediation and repetition costs, and slow post-crisis recovery are not unintended side effects. They are predictable outcomes of early underinvestment, particularly in fragile systems with limited institutional and fiscal capacity.
This matters because education systems rarely fail all at once, as the 2026 GEM Report just released emphasized. They weaken gradually, as pressures accumulate across different parts of the system. Early childhood education sits at the foundation of this process, shaping how systems absorb shocks and how equitably they recover.
Learning gaps begin before children enter school
Underinvestment matters. Global data consistently show that inequalities in learning largely reflect unequal access to organized early childhood learning opportunities, rather than differences in primary schooling alone.
In crisis-affected settings, these risks are magnified. Displacement, prolonged stress, disrupted caregiving, and food insecurity undermine early development, while access to structured early learning environments is often limited or inconsistent. When early childhood education is underfunded, many children enter grade 1 already behind. This immediately reshapes classroom dynamics: teachers slow instruction to accommodate uneven readiness, learning gaps widen, and early grades become sites of compensation rather than progression.
The scale of this challenge is visible in global learning data. Only 41% of children in low- and middle-income countries reach minimum proficiency in reading by the end of primary school. While this figure is often discussed as a failure of primary education quality, evidence shows that weak school readiness and early learning gaps are closely associated with it, particularly in crisis-affected contexts.
From a systems perspective, this distinction is critical. Learning gaps established before school entry trigger reinforcing feedback loops: remediation increases, repetition rises, teacher workloads intensify and inequalities widen. Once these dynamics are in motion, they become difficult, and costly, to reverse.
Short-term funding choices create long-term system costs
Despite this evidence, early childhood education in emergencies is still commonly financed through short-term, siloed funding mechanisms. Early learning is treated as optional — something to be addressed once enrolment has been restored and primary schooling stabilised.
At first glance, this approach appears fiscally prudent. In practice, it shifts costs forward. System-level analysis of education recovery following conflict, displacement and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, shows that systems with weak early foundations recover more slowly and less equitably from shocks.
This increases per-pupil costs, stretches teacher capacity, and diverts scarce resources away from system strengthening, particularly in contexts with limited administrative bandwidth.
These costs are not evenly distributed. They are borne disproportionately by overstretched teachers, under-resourced schools, and households least able to compensate for early learning gaps. In effect, early underinvestment creates a predictable trajectory: weak school readiness leads to remediation and repetition; remediation raises system costs; rising costs constrain future investment, including in early childhood education itself.
Early childhood education as system infrastructure
Early childhood education functions as system infrastructure. It stabilizes routines for young children, strengthens caregiver engagement, and maintains links between households and education services during periods of disruption.
When early learning is embedded alongside caregiver support, health and child protection services, it strengthens coordination across system components rather than operating in isolation. By sustaining engagement with families and communities, early childhood education helps preserve the institutional linkages that primary education systems rely on during recovery.
Importantly, long-term benefits depend on early childhood education being adequately resourced, developmentally appropriate, and meaningfully linked to primary education systems, not merely expanded in name.
What SDG target 4.2 reveals about current priorities
SDG target 4.2 commits governments to ensuring that all children have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education by 2030. SDG target 4.2 recognizes that access alone is insufficient: it measures not only participation in organised learning, but whether children are developmentally on track at the start of primary education.
Monitoring of progress towards SDG target 4.2 shows that participation in pre-primary education remains far from universal, with the largest gaps concentrated in low-income and crisis-affected contexts. In many of these settings, fewer than half of children are enrolled in pre-primary education, and access is particularly limited for children affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty. These gaps reflect wider inequalities in early childhood development and shape learning trajectories well before children enter formal schooling.
The GEM Report indicates that early learning gaps established before primary school act as a structural constraint on progress across later SDG 4 targets related to learning outcomes and education quality. When children begin school without foundational cognitive, language, and socio-emotional skills, subsequent investments in curriculum reform, teacher training and assessment are less likely to translate into equitable learning gains. As a result, early childhood education has emerged as a critical bottleneck for progress across the broader SDG 4 agenda, particularly in fragile and crisis-affected education systems.
Repositioning early childhood education in crisis responses
Taken together, the evidence points to three necessary shifts.
- Early childhood education must be treated as a core component of education response and recovery, not as an optional add-on funded through short-term humanitarian windows.
- Financing decisions must account for system-wide costs, recognising that early investment reduces later spending on remediation and learning recovery.
- Early childhood education must be approached as system infrastructure – embedded in planning, governance, and service delivery – rather than delivered in isolation.
For governments and donors, this implies aligning humanitarian and development financing so that early childhood education is sustained across emergency, recovery and longer-term system strengthening phases.
As countries enter the final stretch of the 2030 Agenda, decisions about early childhood education will shape whether progress on SDG 4 accelerates or stalls. In crisis-affected contexts especially, early childhood education is not a luxury to be postponed. It is a foundational investment, without which recovery, equity, and learning quality remain out of reach.
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