Rural children in LMICs fail to get the ECCE they need, which harms their school-readiness and educational progress. A major cause is that parents fail to provide adequate stimulation and learning at home because they don’t believe they are capable to. We realised parents had the potential to be the solution and just needed to be supported to provide ECD using their own talents and resources.
Through government and a train the trainers cascade, we train 40 Mothers per community to run educational play groups for all preschoolers in their community, and to provide learning & care at home. The mothers follow a structured curriculum and teach using fun educational games that stimulate learning, improve wellbeing, and encourage good hygiene. Parents are given monthly group parenting workshops where they learn cost-free & play-based ways to provide care and education at home using local resources that support holistic development and wellbeing, for both child and parent. Topics include nutrition, language development, self-esteem, stress management.
The programme has been proven through RCT to significantly improve children's cognitive - by the equivalent of an extra year of school - to improve socio-emotional skills and to reduce malnutrition. As well improving parenting practices, the programme also benefits parents by increasing their confidence and standing in the community.
We are proud to have so far been able to scale our model to every village in Mayuge District in Uganda, and to 1/3 of all rural communities in Ghana. At present we are benefitting over 103,500 mothers and 249,600 children aged 3-6 years across 2954 rural communities, and this number is set to increase as we expand nationwide in Ghana.
Our 2-3 year goals are to:
1) Scale the programme to all rural communities in Ghana. We are well on the way to achieving this. We are currently operating in 1/3 communities and an RCT is underway to assess the impacts of the programme at scale. We are currently supporting the government to raise the funding for expansion.
2) Scale in to a new country, through partnership with government.
3) Scale the radio programme in its own right across Ghana, Uganda and
Our model has a quite complex implementation systems as it is delivered through government systems. It cannot be instantly adopted by someone else. Yet, many of the approaches are replicable – including parents as the agents of change, behaviour change approaches to overcome the grassroot barriers, using radio to upskill rural parents. Get in touch with our ECD Advocacy & Systems Change Manager.
