Child development data scattered across silos leaves Africa’s youngest children invisible, review finds

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the information that governments need to protect and nurture their youngest children exists in abundance — but it is scattered across dozens of incompatible systems, and no single platform anywhere in the region can paint a complete picture of how a child is developing. That is the central conclusion of a sweeping scoping review published in Frontiers in Public Health, in which researchers from the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi mapped early childhood development data systems across the continent, with a detailed focus on Kenya and three of its counties. The team identified 44 distinct data systems, sources and platforms spanning nine countries, yet found that only three dashboards and one multi-country survey instrument cover all five domains of child wellbeing that the World Health Organization and its partners say must be monitored together — and none of them can do so at the subnational level for individual children.

The stakes are enormous. Roughly 250 million children worldwide are at risk of failing to reach their full developmental potential because of poverty, disease, malnutrition and a lack of nurturing, stimulating environments, and that risk falls disproportionately on low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya illustrates the pattern sharply. World Bank data indicate that in 2020, 56 percent of the country’s urban population lived in informal settlements characterized by insecure tenure, poor amenities and limited access to health and education services. In 2016, 38.3 percent of Kenyan children aged three and four failed to reach their cognitive and socio-emotional milestones, and a recent national survey on early childhood development suggested that about a quarter of children were developmentally delayed. In remote, climate-vulnerable Isiolo County, an estimated 28 percent of children experience malnutrition despite ongoing agricultural interventions, while Homa Bay County carries a 24 percent teenage pregnancy prevalence that heightens the risk of substandard childcare.

The benchmark for what should be measured comes from the Nurturing Care Framework, launched in 2018 jointly by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank Group. The framework identifies five interdependent components — health, nutrition, responsive caregiving, opportunities for early learning, and safety and security — that must be tracked together rather than sector by sector. The review’s authors set out to discover whether any operational data system in the region actually does this. Following the Arksey and O’Malley scoping review framework with Levac and colleagues’ refinements, they searched PubMed, ScienceDirect, African Journals Online, Scopus, APA PsycINFO and PsycNet for literature published between August 2010 and August 2025, supplemented by grey literature from Google Scholar, OpenGrey and national and subnational government reports. The start date was chosen deliberately: Kenya’s 2010 Constitution established county governments, restructuring the governance landscape the systems would have to serve.

The numbers tell a story of both abundance and fragmentation. From 2,773 initial records, the team screened 2,703 after deduplication, assessed 222 full texts, and arrived at 49 records describing 44 distinct systems. More than half — 23 systems, or 52.3 percent — were based in Kenya, including five county-specific platforms: three in Homa Bay, one in Nairobi City and one in Isiolo. The remaining 21 systems covered Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, alongside region-wide and low- and middle-income country-wide sources. Only five ECD dashboards emerged across the entire region: UNICEF’s ECD Dashboard, the National Evaluation Platform operating in Malawi, Mali, Mozambique and Tanzania, the Tanzanian ECD Dashboard, and two South African offerings, Ecdinfohub.org and the HearScreen application, which the authors note is really a point-of-care hearing screening tool rather than a population-level dashboard.

When the researchers mapped each system against the five Nurturing Care Framework domains, the imbalance was stark. Health indicators appeared in 30 of the 44 systems, or 68.2 percent, and nutrition in 18, or 40.9 percent — reflecting the long dominance of routine health information systems and anthropometric survey modules. Early learning indicators surfaced in just 13 systems, or 29.5 percent, and almost all of those were education-sector platforms reporting enrolment or school readiness rather than actual developmental status. Safety and security indicators appeared in only 7 systems, or 15.9 percent, and responsive caregiving in a mere 6, or 13.6 percent, making it the least measured domain on the continent. Just 8 systems, or 18.2 percent, included cross-cutting financing indicators such as budget allocation and expenditure, and no system captured physical ECD infrastructure like facility counts or equipment.

Only three platforms — the UNICEF ECD Dashboard, the Tanzanian ECD Dashboard and Ecdinfohub.org — together with the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, a multi-country household survey instrument, reported indicators spanning all five domains. The Demographic and Health Survey covered four. Critically, none of these disaggregated child-level indicators across all five domains at the subnational level, meaning that no existing monitoring tool in Kenya or anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa can track a child’s holistic development through a single system. In Kenya itself, most platforms were not specifically designed for early childhood development at all, and several suffered from irregular updates or limited public accessibility. The KenInfo socio-economic database has been dormant since November 2013, and the Wazi Map Kenya dashboard still rests on 2009 census data — a decade and a half out of date for the children it purports to describe.

The county-level deep dive exposed how unevenly the digital infrastructure is distributed. Nairobi City County benefits from the Nairobi Urban Health and Demographic Surveillance System, established by APHRC in 2002 in the informal settlements of Korogocho and Viwandani, which continuously tracks health and demographic outcomes — but no data platforms exist there for responsive caregiving, safety, security or ECD resourcing. Isiolo County has exactly one ECD-related data source, a nutrition-focused SMART survey, with nothing at all on the other framework domains. Homa Bay relies on a mix of manual and digital sources, including the paper-based Maternal and Child Health booklets issued by the health ministry, the Integrated Community Case Management platform, and a pediatric HIV index testing cascade launched in 2020 across 30 facilities. The authors describe a paradox: children most at risk of developmental adversity, in arid and semi-arid frontier counties like Isiolo, are systematically underrepresented in national digital data ecosystems — the least visible to the very systems that allocate resources.

Why does this fragmentation persist? The review attributes it to five interlocking factors. Governance is first: in Kenya, health and pre-primary education are devolved functions while civil registration, national statistics and social protection remain national, so no single ministry or county department holds the authority to compel cross-sectoral reporting on children under five. Financing is second — ECD budget lines are indicator- or sector-specific rather than child-centred, producing a characteristic life cycle in which a platform is built to donor specification, performs during the grant period, and then decays. Capacity gaps operate at both individual and institutional levels, with proprietary software sometimes meaning that only the original development team can modify a platform, effectively ending its life when they leave. Digital infrastructure effects are strongly regressive, and the political economy matters too: a ministry that shares its data also shares others’ ability to scrutinize its performance, which helps explain why technical interoperability is achieved far more often than institutional interoperability.

The authors’ recommendations are concrete. They call for an interoperable, standards-based platform that federates existing sectoral systems rather than replacing them — consuming data through recognized specifications such as HL7 FHIR for individual-level clinical data, the OpenHIE architecture for registry components, and DHIS2 aggregate exchange formats for routine indicator flows. National stakeholders should agree a minimum ECD indicator package of roughly 20 to 30 indicators spanning all five domains, each with a defined numerator, denominator, disaggregation and reporting cadence, with new routine collection commissioned specifically for responsive caregiving. Each country should designate a single institutional custodian for ECD data, establish a shared metadata registry with versioning and published last-updated timestamps, and cost platform investment to include hosting, continuous training and offline-capable, mobile-first data capture. Implementation, they suggest, should be sequenced: an ECD module within existing platforms in the short term, mobile-first offline tools for remote settings in the medium term, and a policy-mandated national ECD data standard aligned to the framework in the longer term. The review carries caveats — no formal quality appraisal of sources was performed, language restrictions may have excluded Portuguese- and Arabic-speaking settings, and better-documented donor-supported platforms were more likely to be captured — but its core finding stands: without deliberate integration, the continent’s children will remain statistically scattered across silos that no one can see whole.

Subject of Research: Mapping of early childhood development data systems and platforms in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa

Article Title: Mapping early childhood development data systems in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review

Article References: Okello, K., Owino, G. E., Ochieng’, E. A., Mwanga, D., Munywere, E., Langat, N., Kitsao-Wekulo, P., Oloo, L., Otwate, P., Wilunda, C., Abajobir, A., Onyango, S., Kariuki, S. M., Waweru-Mwangi, C., & Nampijja, M. (2026). Mapping early childhood development data systems in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, Article 1936644. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1936644

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1936644

Keywords: early childhood development, sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya, Nurturing Care Framework, data systems, health information systems, scoping review, interoperability, digital health, child wellbeing, data platforms, public health