The Preschool Entitlement

There is a broad and undisputed consensus that universal preschool education is imperative, not only because all children have the right to develop to their full potential, but also because it is in the interest of society as a whole (Devercelli & Beaton-Day, 2020). Engle et al. (2011), for example, estimated that increasing preschool enrollment to 25 percent or 50 percent in low-income countries (LICs) and middle-income countries yields a benefit-to-cost ratio ranging from 6.4 to 17.6, as a result of better health and reduced inequalities in income and educational opportunities. Many other studies have reached similar conclusions.

However, trend analysis has shown that the rate of expansion for preschool education was less than 1 percent per annum globally during the previous half century. Trendlines for preprimary gross enrollment have even been flattening since 2015, heading for levels of about 60 percent globally and about 20 percent in LICs (van Ravens & Yarosz, n.d.).

Although a lack of financial resources is often cited as one of the main reasons for the slow expansion of preschool education, three phenomena suggest otherwise. First, in some countries, many children of preschool age are enrolled in primary school, so a significant part of the money that would be needed to fund one year of preschool education is already being spent (Crouch & Merseth, 2017). Second, a large and still-growing share of children attending preschool worldwide are enrolled in private institutions (Global Monitoring Report Team, 2019), not least in peri-urban settlements (Bidwell & Watine, 2014), which may in part result from the significant reduction of poverty in recent years (Schoch & Lakner, 2020). One out of five children in the global south are attending an unregistered preschool (van Ravens & Yarosz, n.d.), which suggests that families, too, are spending more on preschool education than official statistics suggest. Third, as a result of decentralization processes, preschool has become a local responsibility in many countries, where local communities now have the opportunity to retain and spend local taxes, aided by new financial instruments aimed at increasing equity (Ponguta et al., 2019).

These phenomena are not without problems. Underage enrollment in primary school often leads to repetition of grade one (Crouch & Merseth, 2017), and these children are not learning in age-appropriate ways (Lakhsman, 2019). Unregistered preschools tend to be substandard, if not unsafe, and although the fees are often low, the poorest families remain unable to afford them (Barnett & Boocock, 1998). Moreover, the new policy tools at the local level are not always powerful enough to prevent inequalities. Taken together, however, the three phenomena do highlight the enormous investment potential in preschool education available to governments, families, and communities. So how can we unlock preschool’s investment potential while minimizing potential downsides?

In a report on COVID-19, UNICEF (2021) advises enhancing the role of actors at the local level: “We are going to need a new type of programming that builds on local capacities, indigenous resources and creates self-sufficiency. Programming will need to become more localized, adaptive, flexible and innovative.” We fully support this advice but emphasize that it should not be understood as simply switching focus from the national to the local level. Government should retain its essential roles in safeguarding standards and ensuring equitable access by sufficiently funding preschool (Yan, 2019). What kind of policy instrument can responsibly empower those at the local level while also pursuing national policy objectives? What would be the implications for governance? What would it cost and how might costs be shared?

Our topic is “preschool education,” also shorthanded as “preschool”: the phase of education that precedes primary school. Most of the world’s children live in countries where preschool education has an official duration of 3 years, starting at age 3 and ending at age 6.¹1 Based on the Annex Tables of the Global Education Monitoring Reports (UNESCO, 2021), one can make the following generalizations regarding the age brackets for preschool and primary school. First, the entry age of primary school—i.e., the exit age for preschool—is age 6 in about half of the world’s countries. In about a quarter of the world’s countries, primary school starts at age 5 or earlier, and in the remaining countries, it starts at age 7. However, the countries with age 6 as the transition age include the world’s most populous ones, so the vast majority of the world’s children live in countries where age 6 is the entry age for primary school, as well as the exit age for preschool. The official duration of preschool, then, is 3 years in most of the world’s countries, including the most-populous ones. Thus, we assume 3 to 6 to be the typical age bracket for preschool. Some of our calculations would require adjustment for countries with different age brackets, but the analysis broadly applies to all countries.

The term “preschool education” is used as an umbrella term synonymous with “preprimary education” (the term preferred by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the World Bank) and “early childhood education” (used by UNICEF in its report “A world ready to learn” [UNICEF, 2019a]). Under this umbrella term, we find enormous programmatic diversity (Putcha & van der Gaag, 2015), ranging from school-readiness programs of one year or less to full-day programs of 3 years or more. Legal status can be public, private, faith-based, or community-based. This programmatic diversity is one of our key themes, and we will elaborate on it in the next section.

As mentioned in the introduction, a vast body of literature supports the provision of preschool education to every child. The consensus has become so broad that we have not cited the many arguments for universal preschool. Instead, we refer to the aforementioned UNICEF report (2019) for a state-of-the-art summary of the literature on the benefits of preschool education.

In reality, however, only three out of five children worldwide had access to preschool in 2020, and in LICs, only one out of five children were enrolled (van Ravens & Yarosz, n.d.). Perhaps even more worrisome than current enrollment levels are the trends that preceded them. Figure 1 presents the long-term trends in the preprimary gross enrollment ratio (GER) for low-, lower-middle-, upper-middle-, and high-income countries (LICs, LMICs, UMICs, HICs) from 1970 to 2020. The source, World Bank Data, defines GER as the ratio of all enrolled children of any age in a given grade level divided by the number of children in the target age for that grade level. Because the numerator may well include under- and over-aged children, the GER tends to overestimate enrollment (World Bank Open Data, 2022).

Figure 1

Preprimary education gross enrollment ratio by income category (1970–2020)

As seen in Figure 1:

• In LICs, enrollment remained almost stagnant between 1970 and 2000. After a modest increase between 2000 and 2015, the curve flattened at a level of around 20 percent. Over the past half century, the average increase in LICs was a mere 0.25 percent per year.

• From 1997 onwards, LMICs and UMICs—and, with them, the world average—showed a more-positive trend, followed by a deceleration that began around 2015. The world average sat slightly above 60 percent in 2020.

• HICs are nearly stagnant since 2015 at a level of around 85 percent.

The influence of COVID-19 on these data is unclear; in some of the heavily affected countries in the southern hemisphere, the 2020 school year started before the virus began to spread. Clearer is the influence of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that the United Nations launched in 2015. The figure shows that this year does not begin an acceleration of preschool education expansion as intended by the SDGs. Rather, it seems to foreshadow the slowdown. A possible explanation is that SDG 4.2, which calls for providing just one year of preparation for primary school, falls short of the more-ambitious goals and targets that countries had in place before the SDGs. Because other SDGs—both within education and beyond—are very demanding, the unambitious SDG 4.2 may have led governments to stop investing in preschool, rather than stimulating them to increase their efforts (van Ravens, 2015). Figure 2 tends to support this hypothesis. Focusing on LICs, it distinguishes public and private preprimary enrollment and adds the GER for primary education and the Adjusted Net Enrollment Ratio (ANER) one year before primary official entry age. This ANER comprises children in the last year of preprimary education and underage children in primary education.

Figure 2

Primary and preprimary gross enrollment in low-income countries, 1990–2020

Notes: ANER = adjusted net enrollment ratio; GER = gross enrollment ratio.

Source: van Ravens and Yarosz (n.d.), using data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, World Bank Open Data (2022).

Figure 2 suggests several trade-offs. First, after decades of near stagnation, public preprimary enrollment in LICs began to expand in 2011, but private preprimary enrollment began to decrease one year later. In 2015, the expansion of public preprimary education came to an end, and so did the decrease in the private sector. It seems that public and private preschool are communicating vessels, in the sense that many of the families who would normally enroll their children in private preschool tend to opt for public preschool when the latter expands. The result is that investment in public preschool has a limited impact on overall enrollment. Second, the ANER (which includes mainly 5-year-olds) started a remarkable increase in 2018, while the preprimary GERs (covering mainly 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) remained nearly flat. This suggests that enrollment among 5-year-olds increased at the cost of enrollment among the 3- and 4-year-olds. And third, although 2015 marks the transition from growth to stagnation in the case of preprimary education, it marks the opposite for primary education: after 7 years of near stagnation (2008–2015), gross enrollment in primary education (which is predominantly public) resumed its increase, now beyond 100 percent.

It must be noted that a primary GER at or above 100 percent usually conceals problems such as under- and overage enrollment, dropping out, grade repetition, suboptimal learning outcomes, or a combination of these. However, preprimary education is affected by such issues as well. And although in-depth research is needed—and strongly recommended—for a good understanding of the dynamics suggested by Figure 2, it seems clear that preprimary education is in dire straits, possibly as a result of unintended effects of the SDGs: LICs appear to prioritize primary education above preschool, while trying to meet SDG 4.2 without additional funding by disinvesting in the 3- and 4-year-olds.

How can we restart the expansion of preschool education? In an attempt to answer that question, we argue that there is a need for a policy instrument that somehow deals with preschool’s high degree of programmatic diversity (Balsera et al., 2018; Desalegn et al., 2015) and builds on local-level actors’ autonomy and investment potential.

A policy instrument that intends to accelerate the expansion of preschool education must somehow respond to the enormous diversity that we observe in preschool programs. Should the instrument favor some programs above others? Or should it somehow be applicable to all? This section provides a basis for addressing these questions by first describing current programmatic diversity.

Preschool education can fulfill two main functions (Barnett & Boocock, 1998; Jensen, 2009; Lightfoot-Rueda et al., 2016):

• In all cases, preschool education is meant to enhance child development. Along with other early childhood development (ECD) services, such as parental education, nutrition, and health care, preschool education is intended to support children in developing to their full potential (Campbell et al., 2001; Montie et al., 2006). As such, preschool education is an inalienable part of nurturing care (Black et al., 2021). We refer to this as the developmental function of preschool education.

• In many cases, and more practically, preschool education also allows parents to go to work, study, or engage in other activities (Gibson et al., 2015). We refer to this as the childcare function of preschool education.

For the childcare function, a relatively large number of hours per day is needed, varying from half a day to a full day, with provision of up to three meals and napping facilities. For the developmental function, though, shorter sessions would be sufficient, provided that the programs meet well-defined quality standards for teacher competencies, holistic curriculum, content, and materials. Partly as a result of this dual functionality, preschool education is characterized by a higher degree of programmatic diversity than, for example, primary education. We distinguish diversity in terms of location, legal status, program structure, duration, and quality.

Preschool’s programmatic diversity complicates policy development when it is not well-addressed. If a government commits to provide preschool education to every child, then what is it exactly that it promises to its population? Is it one year of school-readiness preparation, 3 years of full-day childcare, or something in between? The difference between these two extremes in terms of human and financial resources is substantial. This section presents arguments for governments to focus on providing a child development program, which other actors—especially at local level—can adapt and supplement with additional hours of childcare.

Investment benchmarks can illustrate the strong variation in the costs of preschool programs. These are instruments to generate political pressure to increase government spending on public services. Influential examples are the UNESCO benchmark (Right to Education, n.d.) that encourages countries to invest 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in education and a UNICEF recommendation to invest 10 percent of their education budgets in preschool education (UNICEF, 2019a). However, proposing benchmarks without specifying the type of program and while ignoring variation in the size of countries’ education budgets is problematic for two reasons:

• Cost estimates based on empirical observations showed that full-day preschool programs with three daily meals and sleeping facilities are about four times more costly than short, cost-effective programs that focus on child development (van Ravens, 2010a, p. 48). Therefore, a benchmark based on the assumption of a short program of one year would be a factor of 12 lower than one that assumes 3 years of full-day care.

• Countries’ education budgets, expressed in GDP, vary too widely to be a stable basis for a universal preschool investment benchmark. Many countries invest too little in education to meet UNICEF’s benchmark.

The success story of Azerbaijan (Box 1) illustrates both these problems; it also indicates a direction for a solution.

Box 1 shows how the government of Azerbaijan achieved a breakthrough by becoming clear—first to itself and then to its citizens—about the kind of program it would use to universalize preschool education. Inspired by Azerbaijan, but without following exactly the same model, we argue that all children should be able to attend a core child development program, a daily program of a few hours per day that can be adapted to local circumstances.

This program should come with a large degree of flexibility that allows and encourages local actors to expand the program with additional hours of childcare. In this manner, local actors could use the child development program as an element in the particular service configuration they consider appropriate for their own context. The program may or may not be combined with the childcare function or other child development services, such as nutrition and growth monitoring. Public, private, religious, and community-based actors can all provide the program. Moreover, the program can be situated in the more-traditional institutions for young children as well as in center-based, school-based, home-based, mobile, and employer-based settings. Local actors would have a large degree of autonomy in shaping their service constellation as long as they ensure quality and meet standards. National non-state actors, such as religious groups, trade unions, and professional associations, also can take the initiative to provide the child development program, adapting it to their members’ needs.

In the following section, we present arguments for the child development program as an essential public good to be secured by government

A child development program of a few hours per day obviously will be insufficient for parents in need of full-day care. These parents will need additional hours of childcare with additional facilities and services, such as meals and beds. In Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia—with its unique history of generous daycare provision after World War II under the influence of theories and practices from the Soviet Union—this has led to a debate in which some claim that full-day kindergarten must remain (or return to being) accessible either for free or with modest fees covering meals only. However, the unintended outcome of this stance is that most countries in this region show heavy public investment in an expensive program with fees that are too high for many families in the country, but too low to cover a substantial part of the cost price. In this manner, the full-day program absorbs most of the available public resources, with insufficient money left for short, cost-effective child development programs for the excluded children, as Ponguta et al. (2019) have described in Serbia. Appendix C shows that it is unthinkable in most of the world’s countries that full-day care programs will soon be scaled up to being universal and free, unless profound tax reforms take place in record time.

Therefore, it can be argued that short—in hours per day—child development programs be considered as a public good, as a service that should be accessible to all (Lightfoot-Rueda et al., 2016; Robeyns, 2006), partly because all children have a right to develop to their full potential (Jensen, 2009), partly because of what the literature on public returns on investment tells us (Richter et al., 2017; Heckman, 2006). Appendix A shows that several sources confirm that the externalities of short programs—in terms of child development, economic returns, and school readiness—are not significantly less than those of full-day programs, and in some cases, short programs may even yield better outcomes, depending on quality. Appendix A also indicates, in general, that spending the entire day in kindergarten does not produce significant added value compared with attending a short and focused child development program in the morning, followed in the afternoon by play at home and informal interaction with the peer group. In fact, Melhuish et al. (2008) found that the quality of a combination of a short preschool program and a good home learning environment may even exceed a full day spent in kindergarten, again depending on quality.

There is another side to this coin, however. Some children’s home environments are not conducive to development. If these children receive a good full-day program, they are better off spending the day in the preschool institution, as Yoshikawa et al. (2013) have found. However, the chances for these children to attend a program in which a high level of quality is maintained throughout the day are small, except in a handful of countries where citizens accept a high tax burden (see Appendix C). An alternative strategy would be to positively influence these children’s home learning environments, partly by means of social interventions such as child benefits and programs to combat domestic violence, and partly by responsive caregiving—also referred to as nurturing care (Black et al., 2021)—by means of parental education, which costs about 10 times less (per child and per year) than preschool (van Ravens, 2021).

Therefore, although child development programs can be seen as a public good that benefits society as a whole, this seems less the case for the additional services that typically fulfill the childcare function of preschool education, such as meals, beds, and playgrounds. In the many countries where tax revenue is insufficient for publicly funded full-day care, these additional services would have to be financed primarily by working parents, but with the possible assistance of other public and private stakeholders such as employers, local authorities and actors, national associations, ministries of social affairs, and others. Box 2 underscores the need for such an arrangement, showing that even poor families manage to finance preschool in large numbers, notwithstanding concerns about quality.

The conclusion from Box 2 is that unregistered preschools constitute an important subsector of preschool education that deserves more analysis. Many families, even in peri-urban settlements, appear to be able to finance daycare for their children. However, the quality of these unregistered preschools is unknown, and the poorest families still remain excluded. If governments could somehow assist these preschools in meeting quality standards, and if something can be done to achieve full inclusion, this can be a powerful and cost-effective strategy to boost enrollment with quality by building on—and improving—existing programs. What are some of the quality standards that such a child development program must meet?

It is important that any preschool program meets the process and structural quality standards that have emerged in recent years from scientific research and practical experience. For the Preschool Entitlement, this might be even more critical, because failure to meet these standards would affect not only affect the early development of children who attend the program but also the credibility of this policy instrument. This section, therefore, addresses three aspects of structural quality:

• Dosage: the number of hours per day, days per week, and weeks per year

• Duration: the number of years the program covers

• Student–teacher ratio: the number of children supervised by one teacher

Other factors that influence quality—such as teacher competencies, learning materials, curriculum, school management, and relations with parents—are addressed in a later section that focuses on conditions, including accreditation.

The analysis that underpins this section can be found in Appendix A, which shows that the current state of research does not clearly answer questions about the ideal dosage, duration, and student–teacher ratios. However, the objective of this section is not to be prescriptive but to offer suggestions regarding key parameters as a basis for a costing exercise that we present later in the paper.

An essential feature of the Preschool Entitlement is that it enables families, local actors, and national associations to expand the three-hour program with additional hours of childcare. This can be done in several ways and with relatively low additional costs. The following examples are inspired by observations made during field missions in LICs and LMICs.

• Parents of children who attend the child development program may ask that the provider care for their child for a fourth hour in exchange for payment of a small fee. In a two-shift schedule, the classroom can be made available for an hour between the two shifts and for another hour after the second shift.

• Parents who make use of extended stay can agree to either hire a caregiver jointly or take turns watching over the children themselves on a pro bono basis.

• Because the 600-hour program applies to all, it would also apply to children in a full-day childcare program. For them, the program would be embedded in that full-day program. For every child, the provider would receive a per capita compensation for the 600-hour program. The extras would be funded from different sources, such as parents and/or their employers, making this a public–private arrangement.

• In Addis Ababa, the municipality created several public daycare facilities for the many single working mothers in that city. These women cannot afford high fees, so the costs to the municipality are relatively high, limiting the expansion of this initiative. But with the introduction of the Preschool Entitlement, the national government would finance three hours per day, which means that the City of Addis would spend less per institution and could open more of these institutions on the same budget. The program would be a public–public partnership between national and local governments.

Box 4 illustrates the kind of process the Preschool Entitlement could spark locally. The story is inspired by concrete observations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Indonesia.

Again, this is just an example. Countless possibilities open up, and it is entirely up to actors at the local level—as well as non-state actors at regional or national levels—to develop the arrangements that would best fit their contingencies.

But rights come with obligations—entitlements come with conditions. It is through these conditions, discussed in the following section, that governments can pursue policy objectives regarding quality, prevent misuse, and control costs.

When we say that every child in a country has a right to receive 600 hours of preschool education for one or more years, we speak of an entitlement. The government—grantor of the entitlement—has the opportunity to attach conditions to the entitlement, meaning that it can demand that both the service provider and the beneficiary comply with several requirements. This makes the entitlement a potentially powerful instrument to realize certain policy outcomes. In this section, we present some examples.

Governments generally need a rough indication of the costs of a policy instrument before considering the instrument, and they will need a precise estimation of costs before they can decide to implement. This section does not provide that precise estimate—this can only be done at the country level, using country-specific data. This is a prerequisite for decision-making and requires substantial time investment in research, analysis, and negotiation. However, this section does indicate the order of magnitude of the financial resources needed to provide the 600-hour program universally for 2 years. This can be the basis for an assessment of the financial feasibility of the Preschool Entitlement, which we will turn to in the next section.

This cost indication is developed in two phases. First, we estimate the salary costs based on three factors: teacher salary, size of the eligible population, and student–teacher ratio. Second, we add a sensitivity analysis to assess the influence of other factors that affect costs.

For the first step, we use a dataset that presents teacher salaries (expressed as a multiple of per capita GDP) for 76 countries (ranging from LICs to HICs). These salaries have been multiplied for each country income category with the numbers of eligible children (expressed as a percentage of the total population). We then divide the outcome of this multiplication by the student–teacher ratio, following this formula:

Because per capita GDP equals GDP divided by population, population appears as a factor in the denominator as well as the numerator. Therefore, it can be deleted so that the outcome is expressed directly as a share of GDP, independent of size of population. Appendix B provides a detailed account of the salary and population data and their sources. This appendix also presents inputs and outcomes for the 76 individual countries.

In regard to the student–teacher ratio, we assume that one teacher can deliver the 3-hour program in two shifts per day. On an 8-hour working day, a teacher would have 2 hours left for preparation, talks with parents, and other activities. Alternatively, a part-time teacher could tend to one group of children per half day for half the salary, combining this with a second part-time job or livelihood during the rest of the day; this makes no difference for the estimate. Even though that second job or livelihood may well be the care of the same group of children for the rest of the day, this would be funded from other streams of funding. Therefore, again, this makes no difference for the estimation of the entitlement’s cost. As mentioned previously, we assume group sizes of 25, 20, 17, and 14 for LICs, LMICs, UMICs, and HICs, respectively. Because of the two-shift model, these group sizes are multiplied by a factor of two to obtain the actual student–teacher ratios: 50, 40, 34, and 28. Table 1 presents the estimate’s three factors and the outcomes.

Table 1 shows that salaries as a multiple of per capita GDP are higher in countries with lower income levels. Expressed in concrete currency, though, the salaries of teachers in LICs are much lower than elsewhere. In LICs, per capita GDP is generally so low that a teacher must earn about four times that per capita GDP for an acceptable income level, whereas a teacher in an UMIC might have a higher standard of living with only twice the per capita GDP of his or her country. This discrepancy is an important issue, and we will return to it in the next section.

In part as a result of the higher salaries (expressed in per capita GDP) and in part as a result of higher fertility rates, the overall salary costs are higher in LICs than in the other income categories. This difference is mitigated by the higher student–teacher ratios in LICs. Had we assumed equal student–teacher ratios across the four income categories, the cost differences would have been even more pronounced.

We have discussed the UNESCO benchmark for investment of 6 percent of GDP in education and the UNICEF recommendation to invest 10 percent of the education budget specifically in preschool education. The combination of the two results in a preschool budget of 0.6 percent of GDP. Table 1 shows that only the value for LICs comes close to that combined figure. From this, it seems clear that the Preschool Entitlement is a financially feasible policy instrument. We will elaborate on this in the following section.

The second step in cost estimation is the sensitivity analysis. This begins with identifying the main factors that were initially overlooked in favor of the focus on teacher salaries. Below are three factors that tend to cause overestimation if ignored, followed by two that tend to cause underestimation.

Here we discuss how governments might cover the costs of the Preschool Entitlement and what benefits they would receive in return.

To finance the Preschool Entitlement, some governments could redirect some of their existing preschool budgets. The aforementioned example of Montenegro illustrated that if a substantial number of relatively privileged families already have access to full-day care, it is a matter of social justice to introduce or increase fees to free up the budget to finance much of the 600-hour universal Preschool Entitlement. A second potential financial source is the money governments save by reducing underage entry into primary school (Crouch & Merseth, 2017). This will become easier after introduction of the Preschool Entitlement because of the greater attractiveness of preschool education in terms of subsidy, the larger number of hours per day (assuming that parents pay for extra hours), and the increased density of the preschool network.

If these two sources are insufficient, additional funding may be possible if government budgets grow at the same pace as GDP does. Figure 3 shows long-term annual GDP growth by income category.

Figure 3

GDP growth by income category (1970–2020)

Source: Created by the authors using data from the World Bank (2020a)

Figure 3 shows that LICs have caught up with the rest of the world since the beginning of the 1990s. From the year 2000 onward, the lowest levels of GDP growth have been in HICs. A partial explanation for the apparent paradox that LICs generally have higher growth rates than HICs is that the former have greater scope for increasing productivity (e.g., by investments, innovations, more and better education, and improved management and organization). But eventually, the productivity gap will narrow as LICs close in on other countries. It also appears that the economic crisis of 2008 had a more-profound effect on HICs and UMICs than on LICs and LMICs. At first glance, the same seems to be the case for the impact of COVID-19, but the long-term development is uncertain. If countries in all four income categories eventually return to their pre-COVID-19 levels of GDP growth, and if fertility rates continue to decrease (SDG Knowledge Hub, 2021), then even LICs should be in a position to free up substantial resources for preschool: the education of a decreasing number of children (as a share of the population) will be financed by increasing numbers of working adults. This favorable situation will last for a few decades, but is bound to come to an end when a large share of the workforce retires (as we now see in HICs), claiming pensions rights and increasing health care expenditures. Indeed, although conditions are currently favorable for universalizing preschool, it is also urgent that this be done quickly. Tomorrow’s relatively small workforce must be highly productive to support tomorrow’s relatively large inactive share of the population. Universal preschool is crucial in strategies to achieve this.

However, GDP growth can only contribute sufficiently to the funding of preschool education in countries that collect an adequate amount in taxes. An indicator to assess this is the tax revenue to GDP ratio: the share of GDP that a government appropriates to finance public services and investments. In 2020, the global top 10 consisted of nine European Union (EU) countries plus Cuba, where the government collects about 40–45 percent of GDP for the common good (Wikipedia, 2020). These countries have no difficulty providing quality preschool education to all; the costs of the Preschool Entitlement would only be a fraction of these countries’ tax revenue. But nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries collected less than 25 percent of their GDP in taxes in 2020, and 20 of those countries collected less than 10 percent. Unfortunately, the tendency is that the poorer the country, the higher the costs of the Preschool Entitlement expressed in per capita GDP (as the previous section showed), but the lower the tax-to-GDP ratio. The implication is that an LIC that collects only 10 percent of GDP worth of taxes would have to invest no less than 4.6 percent of tax revenue to finance those 2 years of 600 hours of preschool attendance. Appendix C elaborates on the crucial role of taxation in the feasibility of financing of the Preschool Entitlement.

Much has been written about the significant returns that can be expected from investments in preschool education. Better health, greater success in education, higher productivity, and lower crime are some of the many returns when governments invest in preschool (Engle et al., 2011; Richter et al., 2017). However, some take time to fully materialize. This makes politicians, who often think in the short term, hesitant to invest.

We can also look at government spending on the Preschool Entitlement as an “injection” of money in society. Such benefits tend to materialize more quickly. Although economists of different schools have different views on this, some or many of them agree that money the government spends on teacher salaries all over the country is not lost, but will reach broad layers of society (Bartik, 2013). As a result of the entitlement, more teachers will earn more money and spend it locally. With more money and less time, teachers may hire someone to clean the house or work in the vegetable garden, passing on a part of their income to other families. Parents, in their turn, will have better access to daycare and more time left for their jobs. One could say that the money spent on the entitlement is like a conditional cash transfer, whereby some people (teachers) provide services and others (parents) purchase these. Most of the money is likely to remain in domestic, and even local, circulation.

Bartik (2013) warns that if one accounts for the tax revenue that is needed for the investment in preschool, the benefits are more modest. However, although this is true for the national level, it does not necessarily hold for the local level. If a country decides to invest in preschool in deprived areas (where tax revenue is limited), this implies a transfer from richer to poorer areas, which can still be seen as an investment not just in preschool but in local development more broadly. Moreover, if an international donor invests in preschool in a recipient country, the taxpayer in the donor country pays the bill. This brings us back to LICs.

Above, we noted the tension between the relatively high costs of the Preschool Entitlement in LICs when expressed in per capita GDP and the low tax-to-GDP ratios in these countries. However, as mentioned in the previous section, if the costs of the Preschool Entitlement are expressed concretely in a currency, they will be much lower in LICs than elsewhere. Therefore, international donors could consider supporting the implementation of the Preschool Entitlement in LICs. The cost-benefit ratio might be among the highest of donor-supported interventions. But it poses a dilemma that is fundamental to development assistance in general: by externally funding a critical service such as preschool education, donors are at risk of legitimizing weak tax collection practices. A good argument in favor of taking that chance is that universal preschool may eventually lead to populations that are more conscious of their civil rights and more willing to pay taxes for the common good.

Other benefits of preschool that emerge quickly are fiscal: the reduction of grade repetition in primary school and of underage enrollment in Grade 1 will directly reduce education spending. Considering the broader range of benefits, Van der Gaag and Tan (1997) compared the cost-benefit ratio of an ECD program in Bolivia with those of projects in sectors such as forest development, irrigation, livestock, and agriculture. They found the ratio of the ECD program to be significantly higher.

The governance of early childhood programs is an important determinant of their feasibility (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019). This section assesses whether the Preschool Entitlement requires flanking policies, how it fits in a country’s decentralization strategy, and how it relates to programs in other sectors.

If countries receive the idea of a Preschool Entitlement positively, the next steps will include the following:

• Elaboration. We have been inspired by ongoing practices in a range of countries. These practices offer an empirical basis that can be explored. The information gathered can be used for elaborating the model, setting out the parameters in greater detail, providing a draft for accreditation standards, and developing more-precise cost estimations.

• Discussion. The elaborated model of the Preschool Entitlement can be discussed by experts and practitioners to improve the policy instrument. This discussion should be ongoing, extending into the following steps.

• Specification. The improved policy instrument could be tailored to a small number of countries or subnational entities using their concrete demographic and financial data as inputs.

• Testing in theory. Simulation techniques can be used to explore how the instrument might work in practice and to predict how families, providers, and communities would respond to the instrument once it is introduced.

• Testing in practice. The Preschool Entitlement can then be tested in practice in a small number of relatively well-demarcated jurisdictions such as small island states or geographically confined districts, counties, or provinces.

• Clearinghouse. If one or more pilot projects yield a good curriculum or a widely applicable set of accreditation standards, these and other tools could be made available to other countries and jurisdictions that are considering the introduction of the Preschool Entitlement.

An entitlement is a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). It defines the eligibility requirements of that group and specifies that program by determining its parameters and quality criteria. An entitlement can be seen as a concretization of right.

The general right to education dates from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and the right to preschool education, in particular, has been provisioned in many countries. Yet the right to preschool has not prevented the global deceleration of the expansion of this form of education in recent years.

We believe a concrete entitlement can contribute to a restart of the expansion process, and we have been looking for one that is affordable to governments—and in some countries, to governments and donors—and still brings the benefits that may be expected from a quality preschool program.

We have also looked for an entitlement that is governable. Decentralization made preschool education a local responsibility in many countries, but often without sufficient funding and quality assurance. However, if governments can be convinced to invest in an adaptable preschool program of three hours per day while strengthening the oversight function, decentralization might become an opportunity rather than a threat. Local autonomy—though always within national boundaries—can create the space for brokering among stakeholders, leading to preschool arrangements in which families may obtain additional hours of childcare, on top of the daily 3 hours guaranteed by government.

Whether this entitlement “works” cannot be predicted. Yet, the policy instrument that we propose is inspired by good practice in countries of different sizes and income levels, from Sri Lanka to Ethiopia and from Montenegro to Australia. We are grateful to benefit from these initiatives.

RTI Press Associate Editor: Nitya Venkateswaran