On May 15, a two-year project to provide door-to-door early education for 100,000 Chinese rural children aged between 6 to 36 months was launched in Beijing. The children mainly come from the less-developed Guizhou, Qinghai and Yunnan provinces.
A tutor will visit the children’s home once a week and show the children’s guardians how to read, talk and play with the children. Since 2015, about 40,000 rural children from 24 counties have benefited from the program operated by the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF) initiated by the Development Research Center of the State Council.
It is estimated that at least three million children at this age in China’s less developed rural areas face the risk of development retardation due to lack of proper nutrition and early education. A survey led by Professor James Heckman, a Nobel laureate with the University of Chicago, showed that children in the program in Gansu Province performed much better than untreated ones in language skills and social and emotional development.
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