Early Childhood Education
A public-good early childhood programme in Somaliland, evaluated by the country’s first randomised controlled trial and designed to scale at lower cost.
Early childhood education, Somaliland.
The earliest years carry the highest returns.
Our ECE programme works inside Somaliland’s public-school kindergartens, testing a model good enough and cheap enough for a government to adopt.
In 2024/25 our research team led Somaliland’s first randomised controlled trial of an ECE programme, demonstrating large, statistically significant gains in child development.
We are now examining how to scale nationally, including a pilot delivering ECE through Quranic schools (madrassas).
The cheapest years to invest in are the easiest to neglect.
Early childhood is when returns to education are highest, yet public early-years provision is thin. Children arrive at primary school already behind.
Unevaluated pilots cannot persuade a ministry to fund anything at scale.
Our response
Run an affordable ECE model inside public kindergartens, evaluate it rigorously, and test pathways to national scale.
Our impact
2025 figures, reported in the annual report.
What we learnt
Certification works.
Certified ECE teachers produced markedly better child outcomes and teaching quality, the clearest signal of where to invest.
Strengthen the public system.
Working inside public kindergartens is slower, but far more scalable than a parallel private programme.
Cost is a design constraint.
If a model is too expensive for a ministry to run, the evidence does not matter.
Read the evidence, or co-fund the next phase.
Partnership, co-funding and operator enquiries start here.