Cheza, Soma, Jifunze: Engaging parents & carers with Vroom tips and digital books for their young learners

• In Event: Improving education through technology-driven parental engagement

Proposal

Addressing early education stimulation can support a significant number of children in low and middle income countries in meeting their developmental potential. However, inadequate investment in early childhood contributes to poor school performance and reduced productivity in adulthood. Early interventions can have lasting impacts, with potentially compounding effects over time (Carneiro and Heckman 2003, Almond and Currie 2011, Alderman et al. 2017). However, the best known examples of successful early interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are expensive (Gertler et al. 2014). In contrast, interventions that are feasible at scale often fail to reach the most vulnerable, or have short-run impacts that fade out as children age (Andrew et al. 2018; Attanasio et al. 2014; Dillon et al. 2017; Martinez, Naudeau, and Pereira 2012, 2017; Ozler et al. 2018; Wolf et al. 2019). Affordable and scalable early childhood interventions that engage parents have the potential to lead to lasting effects in countries like Kenya.
Kenya’s National Education Sector Strategic Plan for 2018-2022 outlined a set of key challenges facing the pre-primary education sector, chief among them the need to develop multi-sectoral collaboration in the provision of pre-primary education services, with a focus on strengthening parental engagement and participation.
This presentation will showcase human-centered design research by Worldreader, a global nonprofit organization that supports vulnerable and underserved communities with digital reading solutions that help improve learning outcomes, in partnership with Vroom and Kenya-based Kidogo early-childhood centers, seeks to develop, test, and scale an innovative digital early education/parental engagement program that fosters early child development and learning in childcare centers and at home. The partnership expanded Worldreader’s BookSmart digital library with age-appropriate Vroom science-based tips, providing a key educational resource for an estimated 1,320 Kenyan stakeholders in eight informal settlements and 150 ECD centers within the city of Nairobi, with a view to expand to an additional five settlements by 2023. Data was collected through key-informant interviews, observational monitoring tools, and background app and Vroom tip usage data.
With the overall goal of strengthening both parental investment and availability of quality ECD digital reading and learning resources in the eight informal Kenyan settlements within Nairobi city, the presenters will contribute to the panel by sharing findings from the Cheza, Soma, Jifunze project that sought to test and learn how the provision of on and offline Vroom Tips paired with a collection of digital books and reading activities can help scaffold positive language rich interactions, both inside and outside the home.
At the heart of the digital strategies lies the belief that digital prompts, delivered straight to parent or caregiver phones, help promote storytelling and reading to children, as a meaningful approach to fostering children’s language, literacy, and social & emotional learning (SEL); and enhancing children’s early learning opportunities. Daily learning tips that spark conversation, dialogue and learning are at the heart of positive cognitive, social-emotional, and language development. They also lie at the heart of reading aloud and using books as tools for positive child development.

Author

• Rachel Heavner, Worldreader