ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what can be done on a personal and practical level by early childhood practitioners and others concerned with young children. Most of this book has been concerned with intellectual arguments about inequality, and about the relationship between poverty and the prospects of young children in poor countries. The case studies of early childhood in four very different countries, Kazakhstan, Swaziland, India and Brazil were used to flesh out the arguments and highlight the often traumatic tensions between local understandings and practices and those imported from the North. The one thing the case studies have in common is that they illustrate that these tensions are not new but part of a historical process of domination and change.
