Assessing and improving the quality of learning and care at community-based early childhood development centers in Malawi and Tanzania

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Community-based and multi-sectoral ECE programming

Proposal

There is abundant evidence about the importance of early experiences in influencing lifelong development and extensive research that shows the impact of both risk and protective factors in early childhood in low- and middle-income countries. Early childhood development (ECD) and programs are most effective in reducing inequalities if they are introduced early in life, provide integrated services that target the many risks faced by vulnerable children, and are of high quality in terms of design, curriculum, training, and monitoring.

Quality ECD programs offer great opportunity in sub-Saharan, where large numbers of children face substantial barriers in achieving their developmental potential (McCoy et al., 2016). However, ECD remains the least prioritized and resourced component of the education sector in sub-Saharan Africa, with less than 12% of children accessing quality ECD services. Programs that do exist often struggle with quality and lack essential infrastructure and resources, such as safe learning environments, appropriate teaching materials, and trained ECD caregivers and teachers. To fill this gap, communities in many African countries have come together, often with the support of civil society organizations, to establish and run ECD programs to improve their children’s developmental and educational opportunities.

Due to their grounding in and understanding of their own communities, community-based organizations (CBOs) are uniquely positioned to work with the key actors in a child’s life: family, school, local institutions, and government agencies. Because CBOs are uniquely placed to be influential on a child’s life, supporting community-based solutions for ECD can lead to long-term, sustainable, positive impact on the children in the communities CBOs serve. However, CBOs face significant challenges in accessing resources and often have limited capacity in organizational management and ECD programming.

To address these challenges, Firelight has been funding and supporting CBO grantee-partners in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia to catalyze community-driven solutions for ECD. More recently, we have been working with our partners in each country to intentionally build their capacity and improve ECD center quality. We first piloted our strategy in Malawi, and are now taking our learnings and experience to further improve the work in Malawi while also launching the work in Tanzania and Zambia.

Assessing and improving ECD center quality in Malawi

In Malawi, Firelight piloted a partnership intervention with our CBO partners and a regional technical leader in community-based ECD – the Madrasa Early Childhood Development Programme—Uganda. Through this partnership, we aimed to empower CBOs improve the quality of learning and care in their ECD centers, and to strengthen their capacity to sustain improved quality.

Prior to the launch of the intervention, we partnered with an academic researcher to carry out a baseline study evaluating the quality of a sample of twelve CBO-supported ECD centers near Blantyre and Mangochi. The quality of the sample of ECD centers was systematically observed using the Measure of Early Learning Environment (MELE) tool. As well, the evaluation team conducted surveys with ECD caregivers, interviewed key stakeholders, and administered assessments of school readiness with a sample of 8-10 children from each ECD centers. One year later, the team carried out a progress evaluation using the same methodologies to examine the extent to which intervention activities were contributing to positive changes in the ECD centers.

Results from the progress evaluation revealed slight improvements in CBCC quality. Clear gains included the CBCCs’ improved access to curriculum and learning materials. However, the quality of teaching and learning was still weak, likely due to the inadequate equipment of the ECD caregivers with the necessary skills to develop competency-based lesson plans. Students’ performance on school readiness tests was slightly improved compared to baseline. Importantly, we observed that some key underlying challenges that were identified at baseline were not significantly different during the progress evaluation – particularly around the capacities, recruitment, training, and compensation of ECD caregivers – likely because these are deeper systemic issues that cannot be addressed in a short-term intervention period.

Assessing ECD center quality improvement in Tanzania

While we continued to deepen the impact of CBOs on ECD center quality in Malawi, our partners in Mwanza, Tanzania continued to request a focus on assessing and improving quality at their ECD centers as well. We thus partnered with the same academic researcher to carry out a baseline assessment of challenges and opportunities at their ECD centers that may be addressed to improve quality and ultimately children’s outcomes. Classroom environments and interactions were systematically observed at 18 ECD centers. As well, surveys were conducted with 33 ECD center caregivers, in-depth interviews were conducted with 55 key informants from the community, and household surveys were carried out with 180 parents/primary caregivers.

Areas of relative strength at the ECD centers included the physical environment, adult-child interactions, and play opportunities. However, the ECD centers struggled substantially with the quality of learning, especially the quality of instruction for literacy, numeracy, and science. Underlying challenges that emerged from surveys and interviews included the ECD centers’ reliance on unskilled caregivers, lack of play and learning materials, lack of food for children, and parents’ lack of appreciation for play-based learning. The caregivers involved parents in their children’s learning through regular feedback sessions and home visits to encourage enrollment in the centers.

Lessons learned

CBO-supported ECD centers in Malawi and Tanzania hold tremendous potential to provide early childhood services to the most vulnerable children. However, given the challenges and opportunities in community-based ECD centers, faced by the ECD workforce, and involved in sustainable ECD solutions, CBOs that run and support these ECD centers can benefit from strengthened capacity, knowledge, and skills to improve the quality of learning and care provided. This in turn will maximize the benefits for children’s development and long-term outcomes.

One additional key learning that we take from our ongoing work, is that even as we address issues of ECD center quality at the community level, there need to be parallel efforts to effect change at the systemic level. Significant investment needs to be made into ECD infrastructure and workforce development in order to establish a sustainable, quality model of ECD service delivery. More specifically, the selection, training, remuneration, and retention of ECD center caregivers need appropriate attention and investment from policy makers, budget allocators, and implementing officers; and ideally, the ECD workforce could be integrated into the formal civil service sector in eastern Africa.

At CIES, we will seek to further explore these learnings, benefitting from the experiences and insights of others who have engaged in similar efforts and faced similar obstacles and opportunities.

Authors

• Ronald Goodluck Kimambo, Firelight Foundation

• Sadaf Shallwani, Firelight Foundation

• Amina Abubakar, Pwani University, Kilifi, Kenya