Scaling Gender Transformative Approaches in Pre-Primary Education through Government Schools

• In Event: Catalyzing Gender Transformative Approaches to Early Childhood Development in Africa

Proposal

In 2016 Tanzania included Pre-Primary Education (PPE) within fee-free basic education, taking important steps in creating access that resulted in an immediate enrolment surge. However, such rapid expansion also exacerbated existing challenges of poor infrastructure, overcrowding, age-mix, and high pupil-teacher ratio.
In this context, Children in Crossfire (CiC) developed a model for quality PPE in overcrowded and under-resourced settings, aligned to government systems. The PPE model – Watoto Wetu Tunu Yetu (WWTY, Our Children, Our Treasure), takes a system strengthening approach and components include in-service training of all actors involved, from the classroom, school through to ward and council levels; transforming the learning environment; parent partnership; and improved school management.
Scaling is achieved through a repeated ‘hub and spoke’ approach – enabling transfer of the quality model rapidly through existing system structures and processes. CiC engages directly with hub schools and wards to initiate quality improvement. This creates a critical mass of system actors, who have the knowledge and ‘buy in’ for quality improvement. CiC works with this cohort to integrate quality assurance and accountability within existing education system processes – continuously adding momentum to quality improvement.
CiC sees gender equality as equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities for women, men, girls, and boys, and equal power to shape their own lives and contribute to society. In this context, CiC’s idea of quality ECE pre-supposes equality and inclusion – meaning that an absence of equality and inclusion in education renders the provision automatically of low quality. Achieving gender equality (and inclusion) in and through education requires systemwide institutional change in the way policies and plans are implemented on the ground, to ensure no one is left behind. This requires paying attention to the institutional arrangements, management structures, social norms, relationship dynamics and political economy issues that shape education delivery systems. CiC posits that effective ECE systems will enable all children to succeed, regardless of whether they happen to have been born male or female.
Gender inequality is also a feature of the high dropout rates at primary and secondary levels, often for girls, but also for boys in some specific contexts such as pastoralist communities. Gender intersects with other inequalities of ethnicity, disability and location to create education exclusion. CiC will discuss how strong early learning outcomes build resilience for all children, enabling school continuity and progression.
The model was piloted (2014-2018) with strong evidence of its effectiveness - improved teacher practice, and gains across all measures of early learning for children, including statistically significant impact in pre-literacy and social-emotional development. It is currently at interim scale in 232 schools across two councils of Dodoma region of Tanzania, benefiting >21,000 pupils. We will present evidence from more recent evaluation on the overall impact and learning from the interim scaling process. Full regional scaling, to all 784 government schools of Dodoma, is underway.

Author

• KanuPriya Jhunjhunwala, Children in Crossfire