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Learning from the P-3 Experience: Possibilities in Resource-Lean Countries

Wed, April 17, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

As low and middle income countries commit to increasing access to high-quality 0-8 education and care for their citizens, they often lack systems to ensure that these resources are equitably distributed and of appropriate quality. A patchwork of resources, administered by multiple authorities, favors urban populations and wealthier families. Non-state providers dominate pre-primary care and education, but they are loosely regulated in most contexts and quality is highly variable. National governments assume responsibility for education at grade 1, but often pre-primary and early grade experiences are neither coordinated nor complementary. And as education authorities manage primary schools, health, nutrition, and social support needs of students are spottily addressed. Thus, while ECD is increasingly acknowledged to offer the potential for greatly enhancing children’s life chances, the reality of its expansion does not live up to that potential.

Governments are already stretched thin by the financial and systemic challenges of ensuring access to free public primary schooling for all. ECD services, although they can provide the smooth launch into education that children in low-resource contexts need, are not yet seen as worthy of comparable investment. Communities that want to harness the power of ECD must often do it themselves.

School-based and community-driven P-3 initiatives in the United States offer lessons for implementers in low and middle income countries about the varieties of ways in which local resources can be leveraged to craft strong and focused systems for supporting children and their families as they grow and develop. This presentation will examine how the P-3 initiatives described by the other panelists echo similarly-motivated but less-systemically designed efforts such as community schools in Zambia, Malawi’s community-based child care centers, and the community preschools of Zanzibar, and how the lessons learned from the approaches taken by Multnomah County and Cambridge can enhance thinking about continuums of care and learning outside the United States.

In particular, the presentation will explore how the staffing arrangements, organizational structures, and strategies described in the P-3 examples can, if adapted for context:
• Address barriers to and highlight opportunities for using primary schools as 0-8 hubs in low-resource contexts with rigid education management systems
• Suggest necessary conditions for community-wide coordinated 0-8 partnerships that link improved educational outcomes with improvements in health and social service provision
• Provide insights into ways of aligning expectations and resources across fragmented systems to use limited resources more efficiently and effectively.

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