ECD Measure celebrates its victory in the 19th Khalifa Award for Education, highlighting innovative approaches to improving early learning environments and strengthening UAE’s early childhood development framework worldwide.
ECD Measure has described its victory in the 19th Khalifa Award for Education as an important step in its work to improve early learning environments for young children, while also praising the UAE for what it called a strong national framework for early childhood development. The US-based organisation said the country’s mix of laws, policies and national strategies has helped support children’s health, social development and access to quality education, while creating space to identify and develop early talent.
The Khalifa Award for Education said the recognition reflects its wider aim of promoting lasting improvements in early childhood care and development. Humaid Al Houti, the award’s secretary-general, said the prize highlights the initiative’s international standing and its focus on sharing effective practice from specialist institutions and research centres working in the field.
Rebecca Mojgani, vice-president of ECD Measure, said the award has become a leading global platform for innovative ideas in early childhood development. She said the organisation’s work centres on the quality of everyday interactions between educators and children, arguing that early learning succeeds best when the whole environment encourages creativity, innovation and talent discovery.
Mojgani also pointed to a persistent gap in many early years systems between official quality standards and what happens in classrooms. To address that, ECD Measure developed its Brief Early Childhood Quality Inventory: Together in Practice system, or BEQI, which combines observation, feedback and light-touch professional development. According to the organisation, the toolkit turns quality monitoring into an ongoing improvement process rather than a one-off assessment.
ECD Measure says BEQI has been used in more than 20 countries across family childcare programmes, preschool classrooms and community-based early childhood settings. The organisation said randomised controlled trials in Kenya and the United States found that educators who received individualised feedback and motivational messages adopted more quality practices over three to four months, with effects similar to more resource-intensive coaching models. It added that the system is designed to be low-cost, flexible and scalable, making it suitable for integration into government quality assurance and training programmes.
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