The Story of Kane & Abel, or Why Early Childhood Education is So Important

Kane & Abel

In the early hours of Christmas morning in 1984, Kane Kawooya is born in Nsambya Hospital, a private facility in central Kampala. His Mother, one of the few female Deputy Ministers in President Obote’s government, enjoys a trouble-free pregnancy and birth – aided by a healthy diet, good antenatal care and generous maternity leave.

At the same time, another boy named Abel Masane is born in a bush hospital near Gulu, Northern Uganda. His birth marks the end of a long and arduous pregnancy haunted by chronic stress: Abel was conceived during the height of the Ugandan Bush War.

Kane is raised by a loving family. Though both his parents are full-time professionals, they spend most evenings and weekends interacting with Kane and taking him to play with other children. During the week, Kane is looked after by house staff who feed him, speak with him and introduce him to the many toys that litter his home. At age 4, Kane is enrolled in a nursery school – one of the first in Uganda – where he quickly develops basic reading, writing and numeracy skills.

Abel is also raised by a loving family. However, under the looming threat of poverty, his parents spend most of their time working in agriculture and petty trade. Due to the limited time they spend with each of their five children, Abel’s parents have adopted an authoritarian parenting style that tends to issue orders, not explanations.

Abel’s Mother did not go to school, and knows little about nutrition, sanitation or parenting best-practices. He does not attend nursery as there are no government-run pre-primary schools in Gulu at the time. However, by age 6, his parents have managed to scrape enough money together to send him to primary school, just as Kane is putting on his first school uniform in Kampala…

Before their first day, the two boys look and sound very different. Kane towers 4 inches above Abel – a tell-tale sign of Abel’s stunted growth. Kane’s language is more sophisticated and he is better able to cooperate and empathise with other children. Even their brains are different: due to worse nutrition and less mental stimulation, Abel is likely to have a lower density of grey matter in his prefrontal cortex and a smaller anterior cingulate, an area important for emotional and cognitive tasks.

Early Childhood Development

These boys are, of course, fictional - named after the biblical tale of Cain and Abel (or Jeffrey Archer's novel). But the research that underpins their lives is very real. Poor children hear up to 30 million less words than their richer counterparts by age 3. Parents from low-income backgrounds are more likely to adopt authoritarian and less engaging parenting styles. When mothers are exposed to stress during pregnancy, their children are more likely to experience emotional or cognitive problems, which can affect their willingness to cooperate even in much later life. Stunted children exhibit slower brain development and interact less with their environment. As Pritchett and Beatty show, these initial differences are likely to compound once primary school starts, as disadvantaged kids get left further and further behind the curriculum.

Findings like these strike at our emotions in a way unlike many others. The fact that some kids are so far behind before they even step foot in a classroom violates our innate sense of justice and puts to rest many hopes we harbour about social mobility.  

How Can We Help Kids like Abel?

If we can tackle childhood inequalities early, this may provide benefits which accumulate through time, providing much more bang-for-buck than interventions designed to help later on. Preliminary research is broadly consistent with this: a study by Gertler et al. (2014) suggests that early childhood interventions can increase labour market returns by 25%, compared to 7-10% for school-age interventions.

One example of an effective intervention is parental education. In Jamaica, Gertler et al.’s study finds that teaching parents of growth-stunted children parenting techniques that are conducive to cognitive and socioemotional development increased the adult earnings of these kids by 25% 20 years later, enough for them to catch up to the earnings of their non-stunted peers. In a similar study in Nepal, Levere et al. (2016) find that parental education interventions are most effective when deployed simultaneously with a cash transfer, as this alleviates financial constraints that can prevent good practices from being adopted.

Another example is to expand access to pre-primary education (PPE). Barriers to PPE will vary by context: in Zanzibar, the biggest barrier is infrastructure – there are simply not enough pre-primary schools. The graph below is revealing: while Zanzibar has made some progress towards universal pre-primary enrolment, private schoolchildren are still far more likely to have access than their government counterparts.

Source: Zanzibar EMIS Data

PPE can be delivered in a number of ways. Zanzibar has three types of delivery modality: standalone pre-primary schools, integrated pre-primary and primary schools and ‘Tutus’ – community­-run centres that rely predominantly on radio-based instruction. These differ in cost and likely effectiveness – standalone pre-primary schools are the most expensive but likely to provide the best-quality pre-primary education.

To the best of our knowledge, very little has been done to distinguish the cost-effectiveness of these different delivery modalities. In our opinion, this represents a fruitful avenue of research to the enterprising student.

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References

• Cecchi & Duchoslav (2018), ‘The Effect of Prenatal Stress on Cooperation: Evidence from Violent Conflict in Uganda’, https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eecrev/v101y2018icp35-56.html
• Dewey & Begum (2011), ‘Long-term Consequences of Stunting in Early Life’, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-8709.2011.00349.x
• Gertler et al. (2014), ‘Labor market returns to an early childhood stimulation intervention in Jamaica’, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574862/
• Hart & Risley (1995), ‘Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children’, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-98021-000
• Hoddinott et al. (2013), ‘The Economic Rationale for Investing in Stunting Reduction’, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mcn.12080
• Levere et al. (2016), ‘The role of information and cash transfers on early childhood development: evidence from Nepal’, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/788751483028902307/pdf/WPS7931.pdf.
• McLoyd (1990), ‘The Impact of Economic Hardship on Black Families and Children: Psychological Distress, Parenting and Socioemotional Development’, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb02781.x
• Pritchett and Beatty (2013), ‘The Negative Consequences of Overambitious Curricula in Developing Countries’, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2102726
• Talge et al. (2007), ‘Antenatal Maternal Stress and Long-term Effects on Child Neurodevelopment: How and Why?’, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01714.x

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[1] This is known as the Matthew Effect or, colloquially, ‘the rich get richer’.