Here are some key actions related to the integration of early childhood development into humanitarian activities (adapted from UNICEF’s Early childhood development: integrated programme guide ).

Health

• Promote safe parenthood for mothers and fathers and ensure that pregnant woman and their families are aware of how to access skilled health care.
• Identify signs of maternal and paternal depression and provide mental health support and referrals as needed. Advocate for health worker outreach to families of newborns.
• Provide parent/caregiver support programmes. Counsel mothers and fathers of newborn children immediately after the birth of the child to increase parenting skills.
• Guarantee referrals to other services. Ensure health services are available in community-based care centres, crèches, preschools and other formal spaces where young children gather to learn and play.
• Provide early childhood development learning materials. Provide stimulation and play materials for young children in health clinics and facilities.
• Provide child-friendly facilities especially in emergency situations.

Nutrition

• Breastfeeding and positive interaction (within the first hour of birth).
• Complementary feeding. After 6 months of age, infants should start eating semisolid and solid foods as breastfeeding continues.
• Household registration. Households with children under 2 years should be registered and linked to food security programmes.
• Training and counselling materials. Integrate into all nutrition materials simple messages with key facts about the impact of early childhood development activities.
• Provide simple messages and parents/caregiver-baby groups at outreach therapeutic programmes and supplementary feeding programme sites.
• Nutrition and early-learning programmes. Provide young children attending day care and early-learning programmes with a nutritious mid-day meal.

WASH

• Ensure that WASH facilities are available at early childhood development centres, child-friendly spaces, preschools and schools.
• Water sources should be at child level along with separate latrines that are safe and the appropriate size for young children.
• Ensure availability of hygiene kits, baby kits and water kits in early childhood development centres, preschool settings and schools.
• Pregnant mothers and caregivers with young children should be given priority access to water facilities. 
• Promote baby-wash and skin-to skin contact.
• Keep child spaces clean and safe.
• Parents and caregivers should be provided with information and skills for treating and storing drinking water within the household.
• Ensure availability of hand washing points and soap (or alternative material).
• Systematically integrate early childhood developmental messages to reinforce hygiene such as connection between hygiene, nutrition and brain development.

HIV and AIDS

• Collaborate with health care providers and early childhood development specialists to track patients who need access to services for prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and antiretroviral therapy, and refer them to health facilities, nutrition support and infant feeding and stimulation counselling.
• Promote links between ECD practitioners and existing programmes for orphans and children at high risk and children affected by AIDS.
• Provide links between HIV and AIDS services and community-based ECD centres. Early childhood development centres and child-friendly spaces offer meeting places for support groups for caregivers or children affected by HIV and AIDS; non-formal education; training in parenting skills; and life-skills training for older children.
• Provide support for families of HIV-positive children. Where possible, respond to the economic needs of the most impoverished families affected by HIV and AIDS through links to available social protection initiatives.
• Support in-service training for early childhood development care providers. Ensure that caregivers are responsive to the specific needs of HIV-positive and HIV-exposed children, particularly regarding psychosocial, nutritional and health needs.

Education

• Ensure that young children have access to early learning spaces where their development needs are met.
• Teachers and volunteers should support children’s development and respond to their students’ emotional needs as they face the uncertainties of crisis.
• Caregivers, teachers and volunteers should be screened, recruited and trained as defined by codes of conduct.
• Learning should be child friendly and participatory, and should include activities for cognitive, language, and social and emotional development.
• Early learning programmes provide an ideal opportunity for links with other services to ensure children’s overall health and development.
• Involvement of primary caregivers in formal and informal spaces established for young children is important.
• Conflict and disaster risk reduction messages should be integrated into preparedness, emergency, and early recovery and resilience activities.
• In order to most effectively influence and encourage communities to foster and maintain peace, education must begin in early childhood, when brain architecture is developing most rapidly.

Protection

• Establish mechanisms for birth registration to ensure that all newborns and previously unregistered young children are registered.
• Ensure that caregivers and young children are provided with information on where and how to access missing documentation in order to gain access to services that support young children’s developmental needs.
• Child-friendly spaces provide young children with protective environment that promotes their physical and emotional well-being, and provides them with equal access to services.
• Provide technical guidance to other sectors to ensure that young children are free of inhibitive barriers that restrict their access to basic social services and humanitarian assistance.
• Encourage parents to create home environments free of protection risks.
• Promote community support and protection mechanisms.
• Avoid institutional care for orphans and other young children; only implement such care as a last resort. These institutions typically cannot provide an environment that is supports young children’s overall development.

Ensure early childhood development is taken into consideration in all emergency assessments.