An approach to expanding early childhood services in humanitarian settings: co-creating with communities and respecting indigenous knowledge

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

Proposal

This paper will discuss one organization’s approach to scaling early childhood services, as described below, and lessons learned.
In [organization’s] work with displaced and refugee communities in Bangladesh and Uganda, it has been seen that the most effective interventions for a humanitarian context are community-driven and culturally responsive. The organization partners with the community to co-create solutions that are meaningful for them. The organization’s approach ensures that the community’s culture, heritage, and knowledge are respected and protected, and as a consequence their healing and well-being are promoted. The communities are involved in every step of the process, and their voice is integrated into the content, the capacity building mechanisms, the spatial designs, the implementation process, as well as in the research and monitoring. The organization’s interventions are rooted in the culture and designed and implemented with their buy-in and input. Furthermore, the work the organization does is iterative, evidence-based, and scalable, and maintains accountability to the community.
As the organization works to expand in other humanitarian settings around the world, it is recognized from the experience that the interventions must also be tailored to different contexts and geographies. However, all too often people assume that refugee groups are interchangeable, and that an intervention that works in one refugee camp in Turkey will also be appropriate for another refugee camp in Ethiopia. However, this assumption is wrong. UNHCR data estimate that protracted refugee situations now last an average of 26 years, and at the end of 2018, some 15.9 million refugees across the globe were living in situations of protracted displacement. So, efforts must focus instead on sustainable solutions that bridge the humanitarian/ development divide to fuel long-term recovery. The solutions lie within the communities themselves, and any work implementers do must respect the knowledge and expertise they have. This approach and the specific techniques may take longer than implementing externally designed interventions, but it is evident how well it works in practice. The payoffs are long-lasting, and it turns local experts into subjects rather than objects of their own development stories and narratives.
The interventions undergo a continuous process of iteration using research findings and learning drawn from implementation. The design and implementation of these various models reflect the organization’s ethos of close collaboration with the communities it is meant to serve.
Partnerships are vital to any path for scale and high impact. To be scalable and sustainable, the organization is ready to implement directly with the communities or through technical assistance where the organization will work closely with governments and other partners to scale interventions and pedagogies. The organization seeks to strengthen existing partnerships and build new, long-term partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, donors, NGOs, INGOs, the private sector, research and academic institutions, and local communities. This strategy will position the organization to achieve greater scale and impact by reaching more children, their families, and their communities.

Authors

• Kuri Chisim, BRAC Institute of Educational Development

• Nadya Khan, BRAC Institute of Educational Development