Strengthening marriage relationships for quality early childhood care and development.

• In Event: Sustaining Nurturing Care through the child’s ecological environment: Innovative approaches and experiences from Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Lesotho.

Proposal

A crucial part of a young child's brain development relies on nurturing care (nutrition, health, protection, and education) in a stable and protective family environment. While some families can provide these experiences, some face challenges that make it difficult to fulfill their parenting responsibilities due to various stresses and conditions such as unbalanced spouses’ roles and relationships in the home. In Zambia, the responsibility to care for and raise a child during and after pregnancy is culturally viewed as women’s work. The role of the provider puts the decision-making power regarding the distribution of resources solely in the hands of the male caregiver, posing a challenge for the woman to access the resources she needs for providing adequate and responsive child care. Household chores and other family responsibilities (e.g. preparing food, caring for the husband), women tend to be stressed and overwhelmed, affecting their ability to provide responsive care to their children.
To address these issues, an evidence-based approach that CRS and partners are implementing through the SCORE ECD1 project/Zambia is the SMART2 Couples Approach. This approach is implemented through The Faithful House (TFH) Curriculum, where couples are provided with knowledge and skills that will help them break communication barriers, encourage joint decision-making for better relationships, stronger families, and improved childcare. The approach also highlights gender roles, effects of violence, alcohol, and drug abuse on the family as well as key ingredients for a good marriage using metaphoric visual illustrations of a physical house-the foundation, pillars, windows, etc., to guide how a strong and meaningful marriage can be built and sustained.
To develop a set of robust interventions of the SMART3 Couples Approach, the project conducted a mixed-method baseline evaluation using a structured questionnaire to assess the distribution of household chores, decision-making power as well as male participation in early childhood nurturing care, stimulation, health, and education activities. Using a 95% confidence interval and a margin of error of 6%, the sample size was 225 participants in Chibombo, Ndola, Samfya, Chipata, and Chipangali selected purposively while communities and households were randomly sampled. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS v25 with descriptions, tables and graphs, while qualitative data was analyzed using thematic network analysis yielding rich descriptions of respondents’ lived experiences such as equity in male and female household workloads, male participation in child care, equitable control and use of resources, explaining the observed trends in the quantitative data.

This panel highlights preliminary findings on how the SMART Couple Approach is contributing to promising results indicating that couples that have gone through TFH training have started communicating better, making joint decisions, and sharing household chores including childcare responsibilities for children aged 0-3 e.g. playing with the child, early stimulation.

Author

• Claire Kangombe Mukumbuta, Catholic Relief Services