Increasing Self-Efficacy & Life Skills for Girls through Edutainment

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

Proposal

There is an education crisis in Africa, and most of the 500 million African children stand to miss out on quality education. The problem starts early, with 44% of children aged 3-4 experiencing low cognitive or social-emotional development. They enter school with insufficient learning readiness and the problems compound from there. Schools are under-resourced and 88% of school-aged children don’t reach minimum standards in math and reading. Schools also struggle to develop vital cognitive, social-emotional, and creative skills that are the foundation for learning and the 21st-century job market. Beyond school, families have little access to informal learning resources for their children.

All these barriers to learning are worse for the most vulnerable kids, including girls. In Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a clear disparity between the amazing capabilities of women and girls, and the opportunities afforded to them. For example, girls who do go to school can expect 5 years of schooling (compared to 17 in developed countries), with higher rates of starting school late and dropping out compared to boys (UNESCO 2019). Girls’ education is also threatened by social, cultural and institutional inequities that enable child marriage, sexual violence, and early pregnancies, which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ubongo takes a holistic approach to help address the learning crisis in Africa. Ubongo co-creates edutainment programs with kids and caregivers to reach them directly with high-quality, relevant, and engaging educational resources in local languages and through TV, radio, and mobile (including simple feature phones). Research from the University of Maryland, Cambridge University, University of California (UC) Berkeley, and Coffey International have found that Ubongo’s programs improve young children’s school readiness, numeracy, literacy, and language skills. Moreover, evidence shows that early learning improvements can have a lifelong impact on a person's future economic earnings, positively impacting society and the economy at large. Teaching and equipping girls with life skills like growth mindset, negotiation, and financial literacy can also help them better navigate the challenges they face in their learning journey. Additionally, there is global evidence for the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of using educational media to improve education outcomes and equity, especially for kids from underprivileged backgrounds (Borzekowski et Henry 2010).

Ubongo is successful in positively affecting perceptions and behaviors around gender norms and girls’ empowerment (Cherewick 2021). UC Berkeley found that adolescent girls who consume Ubongo programs show improvements in social emotional skills, life skills, and self-efficacy. Additionally, Coffey International found that girls improved in financial literacy. Ubongo deliberately designs content to be inclusive, and empowering for women and girls, both through implicit gender representation and norms, and explicitly addressing gender issues. For example, the edutainment program Ubongo Kids targeted children ages 8-14, incorporates character building, SEL, and STEM topics; and girl characters receive 60% of screen and talking time. As Africa’s biggest classroom, reaching more than 32 million families per month in 22 African countries with engaging content across multiple platforms, Ubongo works to transform and influence gender norms and learning for a massive group of girls.

Author

• Iman Lipumba, Ubongo