Humanitarian Play Labs (HPL) in Uganda: An integrated model to serve ECD services in humanitarian settings at scale

• In Event: Part 1: A systems approach to equity at scale in early childhood development in emergencies: challenges, opportunities, and new directions

Proposal

The government of Uganda has been prioritizing the provision of free primary education since 1997. With the launch of the Integrated Early Childhood Development policy in 2016, Uganda formally recognized the importance of providing children with strategies and services supporting healthy development and early learning.

Some of the major cross-cutting challenges for Uganda in ensuring quality ECD services include lack of trained teachers, widespread teacher and student absenteeism, inadequate resources and learning materials, and large class sizes especially in rural areas, and refugee contexts. Access to pre-primary education remains limited in both refugees and host communities. An estimated 2617 classrooms and 1598 ECD caregivers are required to meet the government pupil-classroom ratio of 25:1 for the children currently enrolled in ECD centers.

Uganda is hosting the third highest number of refugees globally and the highest number in Africa with more than 1.4 million refugees. The provision of ECD services in the refugee settlements is mainly managed by INGOs.In the host communities, they are provided by private individuals and faith-based organizations. According to the Uganda 2017-2020 Education Response Plan for refugees and host communities, only 39% of the ECD school-going age children in twelve refugee hosting districts are enrolled in school.

This paper will highlight how BRAC scaled its Play-Lab and Humanitarian Play Lab Model in Uganda. The HPL model complements Uganda’s national commitment and approach to increasing quality and access in early childhood programming, integrating low or no-cost local materials in facilitating an enabling environment for critical thinking, problem solving, and Learning through Play.

Notably, the paper will highlight BRAC’s ECD models’ phased scaling approach across two distince phases: (1): from 2016-2018, when BRAC pioneered the play-lab model implemented in the three districts of the Central region and established 330 play-based ECD centres reaching over 13, 923 children and building capacity of over 370 play leaders on play-based pedagogy. And (2), after the successful pilot in 2018, when the play-based model was expanded to the refugee and host communities in two West Nile districts (Madi-Okollo and Terego) in 2020.

Building from the Play Lab approach, BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Labs are adapted to mitigate the toxic stress conflict, crisis, and displacement levies on young children and families. Through a combination of play -based learning and psycho-social support, Humanitarian Play Labs are developed with a participatory approach to emphasizing home culture in play practices to support healing and learning. BRAC established the Humanitarian Play Labs (HPL) in theRhino camp refugee settlement to support bridging the access gap in early childhood provision for thousands of children in the refugee settlement in the northern region of Uganda.

Authors

• Charles Michael Ariko, BRAC Uganda

• Francis Nabaasa, BRAC Uganda