It is an exciting time for early childhood around the world as our sector is increasingly being recognised as having a very important part to play in the wellbeing of children, families and society. Early childhood development, that is, the holistic care, education and protection of young children is a key element needing to be addressed for nations to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015). It is clear that a multi-sectoral approach that addresses the health, nutritional, cognitive, and educational rights of young children is essential to make significant progress. However what that actually means in practice is not often clear and those working in different countries, with different systems in place and completely different ways in which policy-makers understand and fund programmes, all have to find their own ways of developing and delivering early childhood development programmes. Last year the World Health Organisation, United Nations Children’s Fund, and World Bank Group (2018), supported by authors of the Lancet’s special childhood development issue published in 2017 ( Black et al., 2017; Britto et al., 2017; Richter et al., 2017; Shawar & Shiffman, 2017), made available the Nurturing Care Framework (2018), a document that creates a coherent narrative around the messy network of multi-sectoral relationships to characterise what effective early childhood development means. The NCF was launched in ARNEC 2018 Conference in Nepal.

The 2018 ARNEC Conference in Nepal provided a platform for stakeholders to share their experiences, to identify what worked for them, and what did not, and to learn from the experiences of others. In this 2019 edition of Connections, we share some of these stories in the hope that they will provide useful information for others who are treading similar paths.