No matter where a child lives in the world, highquality early education and care is a powerful equalizer for child development and lifetime opportunities. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) prepares children for starting school and ensures that parents/carers can balance their paid work and family lives while their children are below the age of compulsory education. However, although early childhood education and care provision is becoming more common in the years immediately before a child starts school, in many countries it is still less developed for children under the age of 3. This document summarizes a report examining the most up-to-date statistical evidence on ECEC provision for very young children in 49 countries across Europe and Central Asia, published by UNICEF’s Europe and Central Asia regional office. The report is supplemented with case studies detailing ECEC provision in eight of these countries: Poland, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
