Jorge Muñoz had long championed efforts to improve the lives of children in his relatively well-off district of Peru’s capital city, Lima. In 2019, he had a chance to take some of his ideas to scale. As newly elected mayor of metropolitan Lima, a city of almost 11 million, he oversaw basic services for about a third of the country’s population. At the time, a fifth of Peru’s population lived in poverty, and one in three people lived in informal settlements, where supporting families to give infants and toddlers a healthy start on life presented many challenges. The mayor directed the metropolitan government’s Social Development Department and a small interdisciplinary team of architects and social scientists (1) to identify lessons learned from pilot projects, (2) to establish new ways of assisting infants and young children, and (3) to coordinate to get the job done. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the capital city in 2020, the metropolitan government and its team continued this work, using some of their newly created systems to respond to the larger challenge of caring for vulnerable populations during months of emergency lockdown measures. The national government labeled Lima’s program, which engaged residents in project development, as a promising model for helping local governments implement a countrywide strategy for the promotion of early childhood development.

Miguelángel Verde drafted this case study with the help of Tyler McBrien based on interviews conducted in Lima, Peru, during 2020 and 2021. Case published August 2021. The Bernard van Leer Foundation supported this case study to foster early-stage policy learning.

By the mid-2010s, Istanbul, the biggest city in Turkey, had developed a reputation as a bustling concrete jungle notoriously unfriendly to the 1.2 million children aged four years and younger who lived there. As part of a decade-long construction boom, multistory skyscrapers increasingly replaced green spaces and parks throughout the city. But such insufficient consideration for the developmental needs of young children was not confined to the design of public and urban spaces: in many Istanbul homes, parents worked hard to put food on the table and had little time to consider how to give their young children the best possible start in life. In February 2016, a coalition of policy research organizations and private enterprises launched an ambitious effort to persuade officials in Istanbul’s 39 districts to begin taking the needs of young children seriously. The group drew on help from a network of prominent Turkish universities and partnered with four district municipalities that agreed to join a program called Istanbul95, supported by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, a Dutch foundation. The group created a digital-mapping tool to help locate vulnerable children, conducted regular home visits to support hundreds of families, and designed new prototypes for child-friendly public spaces. This effort to embed principles of early childhood development into the work of Turkish local governments passed a milestone when, in 2019, the major metropolitan area governments of Istanbul and İzmir also agreed to join, a key step toward reaching many more children.

Leon Schreiber and Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Istanbul in June and July 2020. Case published November 2020. The Bernard van Leer Foundation supported this case study to foster early-stage policy learning.

In 2017, Geraldo Julio, the mayor of Recife, Brazil, heard scientific evidence that ensuring children from birth to age six years got a better start in life resulted in long-term benefits such as improved health, more-effective learning, less likelihood of criminal involvement, and increased employability. Julio, a technically-oriented leader in his second and final term, saw investment in early childhood development as an innovative strategy for addressing chronic crime and economic inequality in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. To enable parents and young children to move more safely and more quickly to locations where they could find efficiently clustered resources would require the city to align efforts in several city departments, including parks, public works, health, and education. Julio set up a management team and a steering committee to guide that work and won passage of legislation that authorized him to devote municipal resources and grant funding from private groups to the new strategy. The city engaged an existing public–private urban planning partnership to launch and manage pilot projects in two poor but contrasting neighborhoods: one where homes clung to steep, slide-prone hillsides and another where many residents lived in stilt houses on flood-prone riverbanks. It collaborated with a community peace center that could reach target neighborhoods effectively. Further, the mayor’s teams helped municipal departments start projects that would support the new agenda. In mid 2019, nearly two years after the program began, the pilot projects yielded key lessons about how to improve access to services for families with young children. 

Bill Steiden drafted this case study with the help of Sam Dearden based on interviews conducted in Recife, Brazil, in March and May 2019. Case published June 2019. The Bernard van Leer Foundation sponsored this case study, which is part of a series, to support learning in the early stages of its Urban95 program. Savvas Verdis and Philipp Rodeof the London School of Economics served as independent reviewers.