Dubai Cares, in partnership with Pratham, launched a large-scale program in India to strengthen Early Childhood Education (ECE) systems and improve learning outcomes for over 300,000 children across diverse regions. The program focused on early childhood development and systems strengthening, and included three key components: enhancing formal government partnerships through content design, multi-level training, and robust monitoring and evaluation; improving government support models with high-quality training and data-driven mechanisms; and continuing innovation through direct implementation to refine the ECE approach and build capacity for scale.

The program was also linked to a multi-partner collaborative research study on early childhood education and nutrition in rural Odisha. Led by Pratham in partnership with Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Ambedkar University, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London), the study began in 2018 and examined interventions targeting children aged 0–3 through caregiver engagement, and children aged 3–6 through Anganwadi centers. Its goal was to assess the effectiveness of early interventions in disadvantaged settings and understand whether starting earlier enhances preschool impact.