ECD Financing: Strategic Advocacy Is the Work Before the Work

By Sara Watson, Ph.D., Senior Advisor, Center for Business Champions

What if you started to assemble your IKEA furniture but skipped step 1? What if you started to build a house without pouring a concrete foundation? What if you started spending your salary before getting a job? Skipping over these first foundational measures is all too common in building ECD systems, but hurts our ability to generate the necessary political commitments for early childhood development.

Early childhood development includes the rapid physical, cognitive, language, and social-emotional growth that happens from birth to age eight. During these early years, a child’s brain forms more than one million new neural connections every second, creating the core foundation for lifelong health, learning, and overall wellbeing. It is essential, therefore, that enough funds are available, with dedicated public and political commitments made, to support critical systems and services to young children, including care and education, health and nutrition, and child safety.

Discussions about ECD financing are blossoming, with much conversation focused on innovative ideas ways to use funds to design and improve systems and support effective services implementation. This is wonderful progress. Yet, to date, conferences, reports, grants, and debates on improving ECD systems across the world focus almost entirely on how to spend the funds without giving equal attention to building the political and social capital to raise it. As anyone in charge of a household budget will know, deciding how to spend money to improve the family’s well-being is an important and sometimes difficult undertaking, but it relies on paying equal attention to how to generate the money in the first place.  

Sensible, smart plans to design and improve ECD systems are an essential component of raising funds to finance ECD, as these plans increase investor confidence that funding will be spent strategically and effectively, that allocations will reach their intended recipients, and that programs will be evaluated for success and adjusted, as needed. We must remember, however, that laying the foundation comes first.

The upcoming International Finance Summit for Early Childhood to be held in 2027 will importantly address many policy and system design issues. At the same time, supporters of ECD funding will also need to prioritize the advocacy that happens before the work of system design and service implementation. The ECD Financing Toolbox for the Early Years guide, shared at the precursor conference Investing in the Early Years: Global Technical Financing Forum held May 2026 in Rwanda, correctly highlighted that political commitments are necessary and then shared the difficulties with converting commitments into verifiable financing. Alongside these discussions about “political commitment,” ECD leaders should also be discussing strategic ways to build the relationships and trust necessary to gain these commitments. An important question for all of us to consider is how do we engage in strategic advocacy so that government commitments translate into concrete financing?

An essential part of that conversion is encouraging and building solid political support. Act for the Early Years has contributed toward this with their Campaign Toolkits and Minifesto, but there is still a need for adapting global tools to the local context and building the skills and evidence-based strategy to convert advocacy to action and ultimately funding for ECD.

Every country – and subnational context – requires a different strategy to convince public and private decision-makers about the importance of ECD and to take action to prioritize funding for those services. The latter is dependent upon contextual factors and is where commitment often fails. While many tools and approaches are widely used, such as polling, organizing, engaging high-level influencers and community leaders, and message development, how they are applied must be adjusted for each setting. Advocates across the globe must develop the skills to carefully balance applying country-level quantitative data and qualitative stories to demonstrate why ECD investment matters. 

Just as we support better ECD system development, we need conferences to share advocacy strategies and tactics that bring together success stories from wildly different contexts. We need training academies to build skills among new and experienced advocates. We need foundations to fund advocacy actions to build political will. One example in the U.S., a country that desperately needs to build this political will, is the American Heart Association’s Voices for Healthy Kids project. Its campaign toolkit is a huge array of knowledge, tools, and financial support for advocates. And it is supported by some of the few charitable foundations that recognize they must fund advocacy to achieve their mission. 

We also need to share knowledge about how to build support among the types of decision-makers who are key in many countries – skeptical political leaders as well as business executives, the media, influential high-profile commentators, faith leaders, and civic leaders. 

While the message and approach may be different in each country, each of these groups also has some similarities that can be shared. For example, in 20 years of engaging with business leaders across the world to support ECD investments, including through CE International’s Center for Business Champions, I’ve learned that some concerns, such as supporting the current workforce and building the future workforce, are widespread across countries, and some messages are widely accepted, such as the neuroscience of early brain development and the economics of effective ECD investments.

When sharing knowledge about ECD systems, it’s clear that some principles apply across all countries, even while individual implementation may be different. The same is true for policy advocacy. Building solid, permanent support for ECD investments requires attention to strategically building political and public will. Such attention will turn commitment into concrete actions and provide the resources necessary to establish a new era of implementing innovative ECD financing ideas. Laying the foundation for ECD financing through strategic advocacy must come first – it is the work before the work.

Sara Watson

Dr. Sara Watson founded and was the National and then Global Director of ReadyNation/ReadyNation International, designing, fundraising for, and leading the joint organization for 14 years. Her hands-on work included personally persuading more than a thousand executives to join campaigns for early childhood investments, and supporting them to take action. She worked with local partners in Brazil, Australia, Romania and Uganda to create their own networks of business champions for early childhood.

Sara has spoken at more than 15 international meetings of child development and business leaders on how to build partnerships between the sectors.  She led the organization of more than a dozen national (U.S.) and two Global Business Summits on Early Childhood and the first European Business Forum on Early Childhood for audiences of business executives. Sara also co-chaired ECDAN’s Advocacy Task Force in 2016-2018.  Before creating ReadyNation, she led The Pew Charitable Trusts’ national advocacy campaign for pre-K.  Dr. Watson is now an independent consultant and the founder and principal of Watson Strategies, LLC. She serves in a consulting capacity with CE International. Sara holds Master of Public Policy and Ph.D. degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School.