During the World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education (WCECCE), held between 14-16 November in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, delegates drafted and approved the Tashkent Declaration and Commitments to Action for Transforming Early Childhood Care and Education.
This significant political commitment, made 12 years after the adoption of Moscow Framework for Action and Cooperation at the first WCECCE Conference in 2010, establishes a pathway to address the existing gaps and emerging challenges in the realisation of the right to early childhood care and education (ECCE), particularly through the call to enshrine ECCE rights in a legal international instrument.
RTE has published a statement in response to the Tashkent Declaration. In summary, the Tashkent Declaration is an important milestone in the protection of ECCE rights for all. Among its most significant contributions are:
its re-emphasis of the universal and fundamental character of the right to education and its commencement and the point of birth;
its reinforcement of the centrality of budgetary commitments to uphold political and policy measures regarding ECCE;
its referencing of the Abidjan Principles on the right to education;
and its call to civil society and the international community to consider how ECCE rights can be further enshrined in international law.
RTE highlights and celebrates the synergy between our advocacy and objectives around ECCE rights, and the calls and targets of the Tashkent Declaration. In addition to linkages between our work on the Abidjan Principles and around advocacy for one-year free pre-primary education for all, the declaration calls upon civil society to support national ECCE systems to ensure reliable reporting and monitoring of this Declaration through developing capacities, tools and guidelines. One of RTE’s core streams of work is capacity building and monitoring, and we look forward to the launch of our monitoring guide on ECCE in 2023 as a tool to support the measurement of the implementation of this Declaration.
Finally, we note the points of convergence between the Declaration and our work in collaboration with UNESCO, including the joint parallel event co-organised on Building and strengthening legal framework on ECCE rights during the conference, and the publication of a thematic report published ahead of the conference entitled ‘Building and strengthening the legal framework on ECCE rights: Achievements, challenges and actions for change’, RTE welcomes the Tashkent Declaration as a step forward for ECCE rights, and for the right to education as a whole. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with various actors to advance the realisation of ECCE rights, including through the implementation of the Tashkent Declaration.
Read our statement on the Tashkent Declaration in full here.