ABSTRACT
The chapter offers perspectives on young children’s rights as drivers of policy in Colombia and the European Union. We approach our investigation not as a simplistic one-to one comparison, but as two lenses on two markedly different contexts. This approach invites critical interrogation of one’s own context in the light of the other. The purpose of our approach is to encourage learning with and from each other in a global context. The chapter focuses on how a children’s rights agenda is (or is not) used to drive the development of holistic early childhood development, education, and care policies and practices. We begin with a brief outline of the current early childhood context in the European Union, followed by a more extensive presentation and discussion of the Colombian context. This leads us to concluding that despite the apparent differences between a fast-developing country in the Global South and the most affluent region of the Global North, children in both locations are increasingly suffering from similar detrimental experiences, including forced displacement, exclusion, poverty and malnutrition. We argue that key to addressing these violations of children’s rights will be the ability of countries in the Global North to learn from successful initiatives in the Global South.
