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Scientific and policy advances are putting early childhood development (ECD) at the center of efforts to improve human development. This study was undertaken to understand what knowledge and attitudinal barriers exist that 25 hinder the full-scale roll-out of services for the youngest children and their families. We used anthropological methods honed by the Frameworks Institute to plumb beliefs about early childhood development among members of the public and implementation and policy stakeholders, and compare those with the findings from ECD research. While members of the public and stakeholders agree on the importance of ECD, as demonstrated in other country settings, a major barrier to directing services to the youngest children is a perceptual tendency to 'age up'. That is, to consider learning and other important skills as being acquired in the pre-school rather than infancy period. Communication strategies that incorporate debate are needed to give full effect to the ECD and related policies, especially around the topics of prioritizing the youngest 40 children, physical punishment, child rights, and the pervasiveness Q5 of threats to ECD arising from poverty and disadvantage.

The multiple domains of development covered by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a practical challenge for governments. This is particularly acute in highly resource-constrained settings which use a sector-by-sector approach to structure financing and prioritization. One potentially under-prioritized solution is to implement interventions with the potential to simultaneously improve multiple outcomes across sectors, what United Nations Development Programme refer to as development 'accelerators'. An increasing number of accelerators are being identified in the literature. There are, however, challenges associated with the evaluation and implementation of accelerators. First, as accelerators have multiple benefits, possibly in different sectors, they will be undervalued if the priority setting is conducted sector-by-sector. Second, even if their value is recognized, accelerators may not be adopted if doing so clashes with any of the multiple competing interests policymakers consider, of which efficiency/social desirability is but one. To illustrate the first challenge, and outline a possible solution, we conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis comparing the implementation of three sector-specific interventions to an accelerator, first using a sector-by-sector planning perspective, then a whole of government approach. The case study demonstrates how evaluating the cost-effectiveness of interventions sector-by-sector can lead to suboptimal efficiency rankings and overlook interventions that are efficient from a whole of government perspective. We then examine why recommendations based on a whole of government approach to evaluation are unlikely to be heeded. To overcome this second challenge, we outline a menu of existing and novel financing mechanisms that aim to address the mismatch between political incentives and logistical constraints in the priority setting and the economic evaluation evidence for cost-effective accelerators. These approaches to financing accelerators have the potential to improve efficiency, and in doing so, progress towards the SDGs, by aligning political incentives more closely with recommendations based on efficiency rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Investing in girls' schooling in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) is seen as central to improving gender equity. It is argued that interventions to promote girls' enrolment are appropriate as girls face gendered barriers to school enrolment and completion and investing in girls' schooling has high economic and human development returns. But is this fair to boys and enough for girls? Purpose: We ask how appropriate it is to direct development assistance towards improving girls' school enrolment, compared to prioritizing schooling for both girls and boys, and addressing barriers to gender equality throughout the life course. Methods and approach: We frame the enquiry through a human development framework with three distinct but interdependent domains: protection of human development potential; realization of human development potential; and use of human development potential. Using publicly available data, we identify indicators that are likely to be correlated with the degree to which human development potential is protected, realized, and utilized in LMICs. We compare male and female outcomes on each of these indicators to assess gender parity at different life stages. Findings: In most regions, girls are ahead of boys in both school enrolment and completion. Girls have better outcomes than boys in several other indicators in early life and childhood. In adolescence and adulthood, girls and women fall behind boys and men. This is especially apparent in workforce participation, in unemployment, in pay, and in share of unpaid care work and political participation, where women have less favourable outcomes than men. The bias against women is most marked in South Asia and sub‐Saharan Africa. Policy implications: A focus on girls' schooling should be tempered by ensuring quality pre‐primary, primary, and secondary schooling for both boys and girls. At the same time, we must address causes of gender inequality, including labour market discrimination and social norms that justify the exclusion and exploitation of women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telomere length (TL), typically measured across a sample of blood cells, has emerged as an exciting potential marker of physiological state and of the costs of investment in growth and reproduction within evolutionary ecology. While there is mounting evidence from studies of wild vertebrates that short TL predicts raised subsequent mortality risk, the relationship between reproductive investment and TL is less clear cut, and previous studies report both negative and positive associations. In this study, we examined the relationship between TL and different aspects of maternal reproductive performance in a free‐living population of Soay sheep. We find evidence for shorter TL in females that bred, and thus paid any costs of gestation, compared to females that did not breed. However, we found no evidence for any association between TL and litter size. Furthermore, females that invested in gestation and lactation actually had longer TL than females who only invested in gestation because their offspring died shortly after birth. We used multivariate models to decompose these associations into among‐ and within‐individual effects, and discovered that within‐individual effects were driving both the negative association between TL and gestation, and the positive association between TL and lactation. This suggests that telomere dynamics may reflect recent physiologically costly investment or variation in physiological condition, depending on the aspect of reproduction being investigated. Our results highlight the physiological complexity of vertebrate reproduction, and the need to better understand how and why different aspects of physiological variation underpinning life histories impact blood cell TL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pathogen‐mediated selection (PMS) is thought to maintain the high level of allelic diversity observed in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II genes. A comprehensive way to demonstrate contemporary selection is to examine associations between MHC variation and individual fitness. As individual fitness is hard to measure, many studies examine associations between MHC variation and phenotypic traits, including direct or indirect measures of adaptive immunity thought to contribute to fitness. Here, we tested associations between MHC class II variation and five phenotypic traits measured in free‐living sheep captured in August: weight, strongyle faecal egg count, and plasma IgA, IgE and IgG immunoglobulin titres against the gastrointestinal nematode parasite Teladorsagia circumcincta. We found no association between MHC class II variation and weight or strongyle faecal egg count. We did, however, find associations between MHC class II variation and immunoglobulin levels which varied with isotype, age and sex. Our results suggest associations between MHC and phenotypic traits are more likely to be found for traits more closely associated with pathogen defence than integrative traits such as bodyweight and highlight the association between MHC variation and antibodies in wild populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]