Asia Region/ILOA and ACR-Asia

The quality of instruction in the classroom is key to children's learning and development. This brief looks at the dimensions of guided play, emergent literacy, emergent mathematics, and language of instruction on the quality of instruction.

Training opportunities and appropriate teacher curriculum are often insufficient, and effective regulatory frameworks for preparing, staffing, and monitoring ECE teachers are often lacking.

Governance and financing of early childhood education (ECE) are complex, involving multiple actors, levels, objectives, and approaches, from general expansion of education access to targeted coverage of the most underserved.

This report examines available evidence from the Asia region on the current state of ECE interventions, focusing on the 10 countries in the region3 that currently benefit from US Agency for International Development (USAID) education programming.

USAID/Washington, via the All Children Reading (ACR)—Asia task order, commissioned RTI International to conduct research on whether lower and middle-income countries in Asia should invest in early grade reading.

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is widely used to assess reading proficiency in developing countries. Benchmarks were introduced to simplify EGRA results into a single indicator against which countries could measure their children’s reading progress.