Daycare - A Study on Asian, South-East Asian Countries - Shankar Shikdar We are yet to have any clear information when the daycare started in Asia. We may presume that Japan could be the pioneer of daycare industry in Asia. The childcare industry is worth trillions of yen here. It is rapidly expanding due to rising workforce participation by mothers. According to the report published by JETRO near about 2 million children were in some form of daycare in 2004. JETRO Japan Economic Monthly, November 2005 says, "Although Japan's birthrate continues to decline the demand for daycare centers is increasing as more women enter the workforce. In response, the government has developed new laws governing the child care services industry and has eased regulations to allow entry by private enterprise. Many new systems in local governments have enabled entry by companies outside the industry, further stimulating the market". A literature review was done in July 2016 on the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in five Asian Countries by Rayginne G.H Tan of the HEAD Foundation. The five Asian countries are China, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam. The review was done on a set of 6 areas which are i) program structure ii) teacher qualification iii) demographics iv) funding and governance structure v) public-private market share and vi) current concerns and recent development. Finally some common threads were identified as: i) Asian curricular shift and international ECCE curriculum standards ii) What counts as a 21st century Asian ECCE curriculum? iii) Emergence of single body of accountability and iv) Equity in ECCE access. The concluding thoughts of the review says, "All countries now recognizes the impact of early intervention and are making concerted efforts towards the realization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target 4.2, albeit at different stages of ECCE development. While there was a clear inclination towards child-centric ideals, implementation gaps remain wide due to contextual differences." A study on Early Childhood Care and Education in South-East Asia: Working for Access, Quality and Inclusion in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam by Feny de Los Angeles-Bantista, UNESCO, Bangkok 2004, says in the conclusion (page 102, 103): There are important recurrent themes that emerges from the experience of three countries are i) There is much to build on in term public and private ECCE services, and there exists a broad human resource good for quality early child care at the grassroots level among the members of civil society and the various levels of local and national government. However, the main challenges remain: there is a real need to develop the human resource base and expand its outreach. ii) It has been shown through the experiences on these three counties that a multidisciplinary, multi-sector approach to ECCE is possible and the convergence of disciplines is achieved through collaborative planning, research, programming, and policy development. By keeping the focus on the young child in a whole human being and the family as the context for covering and teaching, borders are crossed and obstacles