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This is a review of evidence on the relationship of women’s school attainment to child survival and fertility, with an examination of long-term studies in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Guatemala, an empirically based theory of social and economic causes of child survival, and a summary of previous studies of literacy and health in developing countries. The evidence that women’s schooling acts to reduce child mortality and fertility is strong, and the studies involving literacy are suggestive.

Given the backlash against the politics and practice of social justice, this chapter provides a justification for an engagement with the proactive debate in political philosophy on ‘equalisandum’—what is to be equalized across individuals in a just society—since the publication of John Rawls’ path-breaking work, A Theory of Justice, in 1971. Since injustice faced by children is the biggest blot on the promise of equality of opportunity, it makes a case for anchoring the discussion of equalisandum in the context of child survival, in India. Millions of children continue to lack the opportunity to even survive within the first five years of birth, and India has recorded not only the highest number of child deaths for decades, but also some of the worst forms of injustice. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on why Amartya Sen’s capability metric is preferable vis-à-vis its Rawlsian and resourcist counterparts, both conceptually and contextually.

This introductory commentary informs a broad understanding of the basic science of early childhood and early brain development, and its foundational importance for guiding productive public and private sector policies to address the needs of young children and their families. The chapter helps bridge the divide between investments focused on child survival and those focused on child development, with the aim of illustrating the complementary nature of these two imperatives—survival and development—and explaining how both can be advanced through an integrated strategy driven by a set of core developmental concepts supported by research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the economics of human capital formation. The primary objective is to demonstrate the overlapping features of effective interventions that save children’s lives and those that maximize their later health and developmental potential, and to underscore how this artificial division is transcended by advances in the developmental sciences.