Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 11: 33-41. A New Look on Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) as Joint Responsibility

Improving the quality of Early Childhood Education has been a priority in Brazil, but it is still a challenging issue to be faced. The fact that an indefinite number of institutions exist on the borders of the educational system, the lack of systematic supervision, and incomplete official statistics are only a few of the challenges. The Millennium Fund for Early Childhood Education has been developed to directly improve the quality of educators who work with Brazil’s most socially vulnerable students. An innovative model of joint responsibility utilizing public and the private sectors in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, has resulted in the implementation of a social technology called Educational Board. This experimental model has been carried out in municipalities of four southern states of Brazil for the past five years. This article addresses the approach developed at the Educational Boards (which focused on in-service professional development and network capacity building), the program’s impact on improving Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) in Brazil, as well as the lessons learned so far. Scientific evidence has shown that the child’s early years demand adequate protection, care and stimulation as the foundations for his or her well-being and development (UNESCO, 2006). In other words, fulfilling the child’s well-being and basic needs both in terms of nourishment and nurturing, particularly from pregnancy to six years of age, recurrently demands not onl