Zusammenfassung:
The Next 1000 days of a child's life (spanning from the age of two to five years) offer a window of opportunity to build on early gains to sustain or improve trajectories of healthy development. The Next 1000 Days is crucial for cognitive, motor, and socio-emotional development. As such, this development period highlights nurturing care, which refers to the conditions created by public policies, programs, and services that enable caregivers and communities to ensure good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, opportunities for early learning, and safety and security. While Early Childcare and Development (ECD) interventions are not new in the Philippines, the Next 1000 Days highlights the continuity of care, thus emphasizing that the responsibility of ECD expands beyond parent-child relationships and the siloes of the health and nutrition sectors. However, research involving disaggregated data in the period of the Next 1000 Days is sparse among low- to middle-income countries, including the Philippines. Likewise, efforts to promote development in the next 1000 days are inadequate or not translated effectively into policies. In this report, we aim to provide a baseline assessment of relevant outcomes in the next 1000 days through the lens of the nurturing care framework using population-level data covering children under the age of five (5). This assessment shall guide us in providing policy recommendations to improve and build on these efforts to maximize this golden window of opportunity in early child development.