Improving Early Childhood Education in Brazil's Urban Amazon Project

pipeline

The Bank's April 2025 Jobs paper outlines how learning deficits accumulated in early childhood and the initial years of schooling tend to persist throughout the educational cycle, reducing future productivity and reinforcing intergenerational cycles of poverty and inequality. Lack of ECD services forms a barrier for women's labor force participation, and the provision of such services provides much needed decent jobs for caregivers. In the Amazon region in general, and in he city of Belem in particular, school days are lost because schools and surrounding infrastructure is not adequately designed to cope with nearly daily flooding from combination of tidal effects and rainfall. To address these challenges, the Municipal Government of Belem (MGOB) requested the World Bank's support to strengthen Early Childhood Education and improve the flood resilience of the municipal school network. The proposed operation would be structured around three components: (i) expanding access to resilient infrastructureearly childhood education; (ii) improving the quality of daycare centers and preschools; and (iii) strengthening management capacity in the education sector. The proposed Project directly addresses key constraints affecting early childhood education in Belem, particularly limited access to and uneven quality of early childhood services, and institutional capacity constraints within the municipal education system.