ChildFund’s Juega Conmigo (Come Play With Me) Project in Guatemala: Program Design and Year 1 Implementation Experiences

• In Event: Pathways to Scale for Playful Parenting Programs

Proposal

In Guatemala, poverty and social inequalities strongly affect the country’s indigenous people, which are estimated at around 40% of the total population and predominately live in the Western Highlands region of the country. Recent studies tell us that 51% of Guatemalan children under the age of 5 are at risk of poor development (USAID, 2018), and in the Western Highlands only 1% of households have books and 11% have push/pull (ChildFund Guatemala, 2015). To address children’s developmental needs in these areas, ChildFund designed and implemented the Nuestros Niños Sanos y Listos (NNSL) (Our Children, Healthy and Smart) pilot project. Between 2014 and 2019 the project reached caregivers with children 2 years of age and younger in 100 communities. To assess the effectiveness of NNSL’s two parental engagement strategies, home and group sessions, the World Bank used a clustered randomized control trial (RCT) to study the intervention approach and provide evidence and insight on how the initiative strengthened playful interactions between caregivers and their young children—and led to improved child development outcomes. Overall, the RCT study showed that the pilot initiative (both the home and group session strategies) was successful in improving child cognitive, fine motor, and language skills. The pilot experience and results fostered civil society demand and government’s growing interest in nurturing care. The conclusion of NNSL coincided with the launch of the national Early Childhood Development program Acompañame a Crecer (Accompany Me to Grow), which led ChildFund to co-design the Juega Conmigo (Come Play with Me Project) in partnership with the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) and four local implementing partners.
This presentation will share the co-design process of Juega Conmigo, as informed by the results from the World Bank-led RCT, and how these were applied to develop the implementation strategy, monitoring and evaluation plan, learning agenda, and advocacy plan. Lastly, insights from the current project’s Year 1 experience will be shared, specifically, the challenges, successes, and lessons learned on the socialization of tools, stakeholders buy-in, and the scaling up of the activities with government and local partners’ collaboration.

Authors

• Sandra Sandoval, Child Fund Guatemala

• Darcy Strouse, ChildFund International

• Cassandra Scarpino, ChildFund International