# **1 Introduction**

Education systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) struggle with a learning crisis. While school enrollments have expanded, learning and even basic skills such as literacy lag for children in LMICs compared to high-income countries (HICs) (Le Nestour, Moscoviz, & Sandefur, 2022; World Bank, 2018). A key reason that children in LMICs fall behind is underinvestment in early childhood development (ECD), generally, and pre-primary education specifically (Nores & Barnett, 2010; World Bank, 2018).

Millions of children are at risk for low-quality care in the early childhood years (McCoy, Seiden, Cuartas, Pisani, & Waldman, 2022). Additionally, substantial disparities in stimulating home environments and access to pre-primary across and within LMICs have been documented (Krafft & El-Kogali, 2021; McCoy et al., 2018). While there is a large literature documenting inequality in ECD and home environments in both HICs and LMICs (Flood, McMurry, Sojourner, & Wiswall, 2022; Walker et al., 2011), and research exists on unequal pre-primary quality in HICs (Flood, McMurry, Sojourner, & Wiswall, 2022), less is known about inequities in access to quality pre-primary learning environments in LMICs.

Pre-primary education can particularly benefit disadvantaged children (Holla, Bendini, Dinarte, & Trako, 2021) by reducing gaps in learning and development that form before the start of formal schooling. The recent push to increase pre-primary enrollments in LMICs recognizes the importance of the quality of pre-primary programs (Bendini & Devercelli, 2022). However, there is little research on whether the disadvantaged children who do attend pre-primary in LMICs have equal access to quality pre-primary environments. Inequality in pre-primary quality could be more, less, or similar to inequalities in home environment quality in LMICs. The relative degree of inequality in home and pre-primary environments has important implications for the potential of pre-primary to reduce, maintain, or exacerbate school readiness gaps for disadvantaged children.

This study uses data from kindergartens (KGs) and KG students in the Arab Republic of Egypt to investigate quality and inequality in both pre-primary and home environments – the two central drivers of ECD for pre-primary students. It is particularly unusual to have data on both pre-primary quality and home environments in LMICs, to be able to examine inequality as well as potential complementarities or substitutions between these important inputs. Egypt is a valuable setting to be able to assess this inequality; the country has relatively low pre-primary enrollments compared to other countries at similar levels of development (El-Kogali & Krafft, 2015). Pre-primary is also the phase of education in Egypt with the largest socio-economic inequality (Krafft & El-Kogali, 2021).

Based on existing literature, we hypothesized that disparities in the quality of learning environments (at home and in pre-primary settings) and disparities in children’s developmental outcomes would be evident in Egypt, as they are in other countries. We specifically examine, for Egyptian pre-primary students, how pre-primary quality, stimulation at home, and early childhood development outcomes vary by socio-economic status (SES). We further explore which aspects of pre-primary quality (such as the physical environment or pedagogy) are more equitable. Due to lack of research on young children in Egypt, we had no specific hypotheses on whether disparities would be larger in home or pre-primary learning environment, nor did we hypothesize on the 2