Two Rabbits

Sarah Strader is the founder and executive director of Two Rabbits. Ms. Strader has worked with the Baka since 2011, when she spent a Fulbright research year immersed in Baka communities. She has 10 years of experience in early childhood development, literacy, and local languages in Africa. She previously worked at FHI 360 and Chemonics International, providing technical support to large-scale USAID-funded early grade literacy programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and Djibouti. She has consulted for the World Wide Fund for Nature, Sesame Workshop, and the World Bank on quality early childhood programming for marginalized children. Ms. Strader is an Echoing Green Fellow, a World Learning Advancing Leaders Fellow, and a Landegger Service Award Fellow. She has a Ed.M. in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.S. from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Indigenous, displaced, and minority-group children are caught between two worlds and struggle to preserve their home identity while learning to thrive in the dominant culture. An indigenous Baka father in Cameroon described this as “chasing two rabbits at once”: if you try, you will lose both. Two Rabbits aims to bring both “rabbits” within children’s reach by partnering with communities to provide quality early learning that is rooted in their own culture. We leverage local knowledge and resources to achieve international quality standards in early childhood care and education (ECCE) by engaging community members to create curriculum, serve as teachers, and manage preschool centers. This model empowers communities, preserves traditional knowledge, and prepares children to engage with the outside world. By putting communities in the lead, we create sustainable, quality, scalable ECCE for children the world has left behind.

Indigenous, displaced, and minority-group communities require early childhood care and education (ECCE) that respects their customs and prepares them to defend their rights. ECCE is one of the most powerful tools for social change and poverty reduction: 90% of brain development happens before age five, and every $1 invested in ECCE yields $17 in lifelong gains in health, education, and unemployment.

Yet the world’s most marginalized children - indigenous, displaced, and minority-groups - have the least access to this most transformative opportunity. Today, 87% of the world’s poorest children lack preschool access, refugee children are five times more likely to be out of school, and 93% of indigenous children learn in a language they do not speak.

Predominant ECCE models systematically exclude the most marginalized because they require costly inputs, have limited economies of scale, and do not reflect the community’s language and culture. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates this inequity, as government efforts to ensure mass access to primary school has pushed ECCE for these communities further to the margins. Every day of stimulation that they miss is an opportunity to build brains and resilient futures in communities most in need.  

Two Rabbits mobilizes indigenous communities to leverage their culture, language, and environment to create powerful low-cost ECCE programs.

Founder Sarah Strader has collaborated with local Cameroonian nonprofit ASTRADHE for six years to align international best practices, indigenous culture, and local policy. There are three pillars to our approach. First, we engage community members to create activities, music, and stories in their language and style, and record them onto solar-powered MP3 players. Second, we train and coach village-nominated youth as teachers to bring learning to life. Our recordings guide them to deliver high-quality ECCE experiences despite their low literacy levels. Third, we build local capacity to own and manage the program on two levels. Firstly, Two Rabbits supports ASTRADHE to serve as the program’s face forward in Cameroon, building their capacity in ECCE, monitoring and evaluation, fundraising, and project management. Secondly, we empower parent-teacher associations to ensure teachers are effective, classrooms are safe and clean, and children are well-cared for.

We have piloted, honed, and scaled a model that proves that, by putting communities at the helm of the solution-making process, it is possible to bring high-quality, low-cost, culturally-affirming ECCE to the children on the margins of our global community. 

Our model was developed by and for members of the world’s most marginalized communities.

The Baka are a group of 70,000 indigenous hunter-gatherers in central Africa whose identity is deeply connected to a disappearing forest. While they are masters of the forest in every way, 80% of adults identify as illiterate. School is in a foreign language (French), with non-Baka teachers and curriculum that alienates their culture. Unable to read, write, or speak French, they have limited ability to defend their rights. Our name comes from a Baka father who said Baka children must “chase two rabbits at once:” pursue both ancestral forest-based education and formal schooling.

Baka communities in Cameroon co-designed our model from the ground up to bring both “rabbits” within reach. Baka leaders worked with ECCE curriculum experts to create music, games, and activities rooted in the forest. Our first teacher cohorts were pioneers and co-innovators, testing ideas and helping us continuously align classroom materials and coaching support with their needs.

Our program is an ECCE model and community empowerment program that leverages abundantly available local resources to achieve international quality standards while honoring their culture and language. 

Two Rabbits is specifically designed by and for communities that predominant models leave behind. Indigenous Baka communities led design and iteration, ensuring that the model is cost-effective and scalable in extremely low-resource settings and uplift traditionally-oppressed groups. Two Rabbits’ impact goes far beyond expanding ECCE access to traditionally excluded groups. Our model has proven impacts on early childhood development outcomes, creates employment and leadership opportunities for youth, boosts cultural pride for both caregivers and children, and demonstrates to the world that marginalized communities can lead solutions to the challenges they face. 

As a Fulbright researcher, I spent a year hunting, fishing, and gathering with Baka families, exploring their different educations to prepare children for an uncertain future. Schoolteachers routinely underestimated Baka children as “Pygmies [pejorative term for Baka] with small stature, small intellect, and small potential.”

The children showed me something far different: independent, hands-on learners, deeply connected to the forest. Their ingenuity, perceptiveness, and independence are stifled by rote learning in French in stuffy classrooms.

Through conversations with families over cooking fires and forest walks, we brainstormed a school to harness children’s skills, and empower them to become leaders to fight discrimination.  

We launched our two-village pilot with 50 children in 2015. Six years, $450,000, and countless all-nighters later, we are reaching 1,000 children daily. It is humbling to work with families to build the education they feel their kids deserve. My dear friends have become teachers and our first teachers are now master trainers. Together, we teach kids they are smart, ambitious, and can dream big, not in spite of their identity, but because of it. I am honored to be part of their fight for justice. 

Two Rabbits is not a project – it is a joint creation with close friends, an expression of our shared humanity, and an effort to build a more just future.

I have lived and worked with Baka communities since 2011. Our teachers, students, parents, voice actors, and musicians are often dear friends, some nearly family, with whom I have grown up over the years. They showed me that generosity is not giving what you can, but committing to caring for someone in hard and easy times. As someone with privilege and power in an unjust world, it is my responsibility to elevate marginalized voices and support their fight against injustices like displacement, forced assimilation, and separation from ancestral land.

As an early childhood specialist, I know that knowledge is power. I have witnessed how schooling can be a neocolonial force that systematically replicates unjust social hierarchies. The Baka innovators I have the joy of working with show that there is another way. Our community-based ECCE model boosts global efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4.2 of universal access to ECCE by eschewing business as usual and focusing on empowering marginalized groups to transcend oppression. 

I am part of a diverse community of innovators that brings together international best practice and local innovations to create effective and scalable programming.

I bring technical, operational, and entrepreneurial skills, and a firm commitment to social justice. I am a specialist in early childhood development and mother-tongue instruction with a Master’s in early education, 10 years’ experience collaboratively developing education solutions with Baka communities, and eight years’ experience designing, implementing, and monitoring nationwide local language education programs in Africa. I have raised over $450,000 for Two Rabbits since 2013, including a 20-village proof of concept impact evaluation. I have strong connections with Ministry, World Bank, UNICEF, and private sector groups who are enthusiastic about the project and poised to facilitate scale-up. I have supported ASTRADHE to build their operational and technical capacity, grow from four part-time to 15 full-time staff, and upgrade organizational systems. I am deeply dedicated to social justice, and position myself and my work as a vehicle to uplift marginalized voices.

I work with a team of 15 amazing educators and community leaders at our local nonprofit partner ASTRADHE in Cameroon, who are the forward face of our work on the ground. ASTRADHE director Brigitte Anziom has over 19 years’ experience in community-based education and development as a teacher, researcher, and nonprofit director. Her expertise includes local language translation, agro-forestry, human rights, gender inclusivity, and early learning. ASTRADHE’s team of linguists, educators, and technicians comprises Baka leaders with deep trusting community relationships that facilitate collaborative innovation.

With my father’s stroke, my family lost our home, car, and income in the span of a week. We had two new beasts to contend with: poverty and the emotional burdens of shame and hardship.

I supported my family by waitressing at 14. To pay for college, I worked one to three jobs all year each year, working four jobs to avoid dropping out when my financial aid package changed in my senior year.

To face the emotional challenges, I found refuge in social justice work. Spreading joy, practicing solidarity, and reducing others’ suffering allows me to pay forward my parents’ love and generosity. In service to others, I also found a way to boost my father’s sense of purpose and pride, which had slipped away with the loss of his job, car, and much of his motor and verbal functioning. I carry with me always a tiny toy moose from his car, so he knows that he is always with me despite being unable to travel himself to Cameroon. Like rough weather that causes tree roots to dig deeper, this experience has strengthened my family’s bonds, and strengthened my identity as a person in the service of others.  

When we initially pitched our approach, conventional donors found it too unusual to invest in. They were skeptical that minimally-educated youth could deliver quality ECCE, and doubted the effectiveness or scalability of local language instruction.

Rejection was discouraging. But I resolved that being labeled “unconventional” pointed to our innovativeness. Donor hesitation indicated that we were truly confronting structural discrimination in mainstream education. Rather than adapt to win funding, I recommitted myself to the approach as caregivers designed it. This was a risky path, but worthwhile to truly honor the communities’ fight for justice.

Recognizing the importance of data to gain donor trust, I designed a lean pilot to test our approach and demonstrate results. I raised support from individual donors and tiny grants, rallied the intrepid team at ASTRADHE, trained them on interactive audio instruction, and set up activities in two villages.

Evaluation data showed our pilot doubled literacy outcomes and closed gender gaps in learning outcomes in treatment villages as compared with control villages. More importantly, we embedded participatory action research to test assumptions, gather feedback, and integrate improvements. Our impact and iteration earned us credibility and funding, and allowed us to refine and expand a truly community-centered model. 

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Two Rabbits puts the child and her community at the center of our model, challenging dominant paradigms of ECCE.

Dominant models prioritize reaching large numbers of children by using majority languages and mainstream cultural norms, which pushes ethnic and linguistic minorities further to the margins.  We witnessed this firsthand: A large international organization spent $66 per child to open ECCE centers for Baka children in our zone. Few attended, and most centers closed within months, for the same three reasons that plague dominant models worldwide. First, it was created without community involvement, and parents did not feel ownership of the centers. Second, it used francophone teachers and curriculum, alienating indigenous children and inhibiting learning. Third, it relied on resource-intensive inputs such as certified teachers from outside the community, making economies of scale difficult to achieve.

For four years we have reached more children at a fraction of the cost. Two Rabbits revolutionizes the ECCE sector in three ways. First, we are rooted in the child's language, environment, and community. Second, we partner with local communities and organizations to ensure deep ownership, widespread adoption, and sustainability. Third, we use low-cost technology – solar-powered MP3 players – to scale easily and cheaply among marginalized and hard-to-reach communities.  By engaging community members as leaders, we disrupt business as usual in ECCE and empower communities to be agents of change in educational justice.

Quality ECCE is playful, child-centered, and supports learners’ physical, language, cognitive, and socio-emotional needs (Wiysahnyuy, 2013; Early, 2007; Britto, 2011; WHO, UNICEF, & World Bank, 2016). It is delivered in a language children speak and understand in safe and joyful learning environments (ibid; Benson, 2010). ECCE for marginalized populations must respect communities’ aspirations for child development, serve as a bridge between home and school, and be a tool for empowerment and equity (McTurk, 2011; Nsamenang, 2006).

Key predictors of child outcomes are the quality of teacher-child interactions, and the quality of the learning environment (Bredekamp, 2009; Vygotsky, 1967; Sinclair, 1970). Teachers that reflect children’s identities, even with low education and literacy levels, can create enriching and welcoming environments conducive to child development with appropriate support and training (Save the Children, 2015; Dogbe, 2016).

Our theory of change therefore posits that community-led ECCE will yield culturally relevant instruction, leading to greater child development outcomes, local leadership capacity, and cultural pride:

Activities. If we:

• Engage community members to develop ECCE activities, music, and stories rooted in their language and culture;
• Deliver this content in audio form via durable MP3 devices;
• Train community-nominated youth in child-centered pedagogy, ECCE curriculum, and MP3 device operation;
• Build local community-based organizations’ capacity to manage and oversee the program;

Outcomes. Then:

• Children’s earliest encounters with organized learning will be positive, empowering, and enriching;
• Youth teachers will build leadership skills and faithfully deliver quality ECCE enrichment;
• Local community-based organizations will ensure the program evolves to reflect community realities and priorities;

Impact. Resulting in:

• Increased child cognitive, motor, and socioemotional development;
• Greater community sense of pride in their culture and identity;
• Stronger community leadership skills among teachers and community-based organizations

Two Rabbits has reached 1,400 children, 60 youth teachers, and 100 parent-teacher association leaders in 20 villages. Ninety percent of our teachers meet international instructional quality standards. Our 2019 impact evaluation showed our learners have 33% higher scores in literacy, 34% higher motor skills, and 22% higher numeracy skills over control group children, as well as greater cultural pride.

Two Rabbits served 700 children and 60 teachers in school year (SY) 2019-2020. In SY2020-2021, we will reach 1,000 children and 80 teachers in 20 villages. We will also use evaluation results to inform a teacher-led workshop to consolidate our model into an open-source toolkit for replication in new contexts.

The Ministry of Basic Education’s (MINEDUB) 2015 community-based preschool policy authorizes villages to create community preschool centers (CPC) by identifying local teachers for MINEDUB to train and maintaining informal schoolhouses. The policy targets ECCE expansion in Education Priority Zones (ZEP), characterized by concentrations of poor, rural, indigenous, and displaced children. To date, fewer than 100 CPCs exist, and MINEDUB lacks curricular materials and pedagogical support frameworks to ensure quality and cultural responsiveness.

Recognizing our results, MINEDUB requested our technical support to apply principles of our model to 1,500 preschool centers over the next five years. Two Rabbits’ fundraising will cover technical support for curriculum adaptation and training of master trainers. MINEDUB personnel, systems, and budget will cover program delivery, including teacher training and coaching, materials printing and delivery, and program monitoring.

In SY2021-2022, we will leverage our strong presence and government relationships to expand within the East region and pilot Ministry handover, reaching 50 CPCs and 2,000 children. In SY2022-2023, these inspectors become peer trainers in select districts in other ZEP, reaching 500 CPCs and 20,000 children. In SY2023-2026, these “first adopters” will progressively mentor remaining district leaders to reach 1,500 CPCs and 60,000 children.

Our short and long-term goals seek to expand breadth and depth of impact.

Breadth. By June 2021, we will publish an open-source toolkit of Two Rabbits content, with guidelines for adaptation to new contexts in Cameroon and beyond. This will include lesson scripts, training modules, guidelines for producing homemade learning materials, and quality monitoring rubrics. Adaptation guidelines will feature tips on translation and creating culturally-based characters, music, and stories. As described above, we will support MINEDUB to expand use of this model to reach 60,000 children within five years.

Depth. We have four strategic priorities for increased depth.

First, we are adapting our teacher-facing content to train caregivers on at-home child stimulation. This will boost child stimulation beyond the classroom, and support resilience to school closures during and beyond COVID-19.

Second, we are increasing holistic service provision in water, sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, health, and protection. We have mapped government, civil society, private sector, and community efforts in these areas, and begun developing a strategy to leverage CPCs as integrated service-delivery hubs. In partnership with Colgate-Palmolive, we are providing hygiene materials and education to teachers, children, and families.

Third, we will integrate explicit leadership training into our teacher professional development program. Our teachers increasingly serve as community role models and advocates, and requested training to enhance their skills.

Finally, we will retain our 20 original CPCs as innovation laboratories. We will conduct action research to pilot new strategies and initiatives, and contribute community-generated knowledge to the global ECCE community of practice.

We see technical, financial, and legal barriers to accomplish our goals.

Technical. We see technical challenges in scale-up and behavior change.

Scale-up. MINEDUB has an ambitious agenda for CPC expansion. They have government and World Bank funds for delivery, but lack a strategy for developing curriculum, training modules, and monitoring tools to assure quality. In our earliest partnership conversations, MINEDUB ECCE leadership planned just four weeks to develop all curricular tools and training cascade modules. We need to establish a common understanding of the content adaptation and scale-up process, and to balance careful attention to quality and pressure for rapid program roll-out.

Behavior change. We foresee technical challenges in integrating support to caregivers for at-home stimulation. Caregiver training programs often underestimate their power and ingenuity. Supporting them often means dictating new practices, and strategies for motivating them to adopt new behaviors entail criticizing their current ones. We seek to capitalize on caregiver creativity and love for their children, rather than stifle it. To do this, we need deeper understanding of barriers and motivators to adoption of key behaviors.

Financial. We have successfully piloted and scaled with the Baka and have had a number of conversations with potential donors and partners about going to scale in new contexts. However, we are still seeking donors willing to support us to analyze and refine our model specifically for this purpose.

Legal. We want to make our content open-source, but realize the need for ownership over key content for organizational sustainability.

We are targeting technical, financial, and legal preparations to accomplish our goals.

Technical. We seek technical support in scale-up and behavior change.

Scale-up. We developed an effective model for the Baka and successfully scaled with that group. We learned a great deal about the dynamics of scale through this process and integrated necessary adaptations into our content and delivery models. However, we realize that government-led scaling with multiple ethnic groups requires expertise on scale itself: how to standardize, streamline, and “hand over” our model for sustained government implementation.

Behavior change. Like other education initiatives, our work engages teachers who have legal mandate, training, and salary to support learning. These are not typical for caregivers. We seek expertise in human behavior change to help us integrate best practices in supporting and empowering caregivers to conduct at-home stimulation activities.

Funding. We seek funding to prepare our model for nationwide scale. While we find donors ready to fund scale-up of pilots, we require in-between funding to refine and test our model specifically for scale. The government’s commitment to CPC expansion is significant and ambitious. We seek funding for collaborative review, adaptation, and progressive roll-out of a scaled-up model per the plan described above. This will allow us to integrate rapid cycles of design, implementation, analysis, and reflection in the early phases of expansion to troubleshoot issues and make adjustments for scale.

Legal. We seek legal guidance to balance making our toolkit and strategies open-source while securing intellectual property rights over key content.

Two Rabbits partners with ASTRADHE, MINEDUB, and universities.

ASTRADHE. ASTRADHE is the forward face of our program on the ground. Their close relationships with communities and capacity building support from Two Rabbits, have enabled them to become a leader in indigenous education and empowerment in Cameroon. Their role includes curriculum adaptation, translation, and recording; teacher monitoring and coaching; data collection; government advocacy; and local program administration. Marginalized communities often lack strong civil society organizations that can defend their interests and support their right to education that respects their identity. ASTRADHE’s role is essential to program sustainability and community empowerment. Their capacity building pathway is an essential element of the Two Rabbits model that we seek to replicate in new contexts.

MINEDUB. MINEDUB, through the CPC policy and under Sustainable Development Goal 4.2, is mandated to provide universal access to ECCE. Our program aligns with national MINEDUB ECCE curriculum guidelines and local inspectors co-train our teachers.  We are currently finalizing a memorandum of understanding with MINEDUB to integrate our model into the official CPC program for nationwide expansion.

Universities. We have partnered with the University of Yaoundé, Harvard University, Georgetown University, and an international platform of professors and researchers through Saving Brains/Grand Challenges Canada to embed research into our work. Through this, we have developed a culturally-adapted framework and measurement tool for social and emotional development; conducted an impact evaluation of our program; and mapped holistic ECCE services at the national and local level.

Two Rabbits provides strategic value at three levels: the child, the community, and the education system.

At the child level, our alumni are better prepared to succeed in school and become proud community leaders. Our 2019 impact evaluation showed learners have higher gains by 33% in literacy and language, 34% in motor, and 22% in numeracy skills over baseline as compared with control groups, controlling for age. Children have greater pride in their culture, and caregivers have greater faith in their children’s potential to achieve their dreams.

We build community leadership through collaborative curriculum creation and teacher training. Communities are leading their own ECCE solutions, a point of pride for a people facing generations of oppression and stigma. Our teachers are leaders in the classroom and beyond. Observation data shows 90% of teachers meet international standards for instructional quality, and qualitative data shows teachers increasingly serve as advocates for their community’s rights and interests.

At the system level, we have created a cost-effective ECCE model designed for scale in hardest-to-reach communities. Our cost tracking data shows annual per-child recurring costs of $18, which includes $15 in teacher training, $2.50 in purchase and printing of classroom materials, and $0.50 in teacher coaching/monitoring. This is compared with $83 per child per year on average for ECCE programs in Cameroon (Gustafsson-Wright, 2018). We expect economies of scale to lower recurring costs by approximately 10%, including large-scale print runs, bulk material purchases, and bigger teacher training sessions.

Our financial model includes leveraging local resources for sustaining program delivery, and generating revenue for growth and innovation.

Sustaining costs. We have identified two sources of funds for sustained CPC implementation.

• Local government funding. MINEDUB, with support from the World Bank, is allocating annual block grants to CPCs to cover teacher salaries, training, and materials.  
• Corporate social responsibility (CSR). Private companies in Cameroon are required to offset negative impacts through community development projects. In Baka zones for example, logging companies remit a percentage of revenue each year into a municipal fund that village councils apply to for development initiatives. We are in early discussions with two companies about designating community preschool as their priority CSR program.

Growth. We will generate revenue to expand and deepen our impact through partnerships for expansion and innovation.

• Expansion. With our open-source toolkit and adaptation guidelines complete, and with lessons learned from scaling in Cameroon, we will offer technical assistance to governments and international organizations to support their adoption of the Two Rabbits model.
• Innovation. We will retain our current 20 CPCs as laboratories and centers of excellence. Through partnerships with foundations, universities, and international organizations, we will design and test new innovations. Our teachers know how to test out new ideas and give honest feedback for improvement. By engaging directly with “end-users” of development initiatives as co-creators, we will generate grounded evidence on effective ECCE approaches to further advance the field.

We conducted our baseline assessment, developed our minimum viable product, and rolled it out to two villages with funding from World Learning ($9,500 in 2014), the National Geographic Legacy Fund ($25,000 in 2014), Georgetown University ($4,200 in 2014) and individual donors ($12,000 in 2016 and $26,000 in 2017). With support from Harvard University ($10,000 in 2017), we conducted our impact evaluation with two treatment and eight control villages and began revision to integrate lessons learned. With support from Saving Brains ($90,000 in 2018) and individual donors ($37,000 in 2018), we completed curriculum revision and rolled it out to 10 villages with 10 control villages, reaching 20 teachers and 300 children. In 2019, funding from Saving Brains ($57,000), individual donors ($30,500), and Georgetown University ($9,000) allowed us to evaluate impact in these 20 villages, and then roll out the program in all 20, reaching 60 teachers and 700 children. 

Our fundraising goal is $895,000 over three years in grants and partnerships. We categorize fundraising goals between funds for sustained implementation, growth, and innovation.

Sustaining implementation. Through the World Bank PAREC project and the MINEDUB CPC program, MINEDUB will cover recurring operating costs for CPCs within the next three years. This includes teacher materials, training, coaching, and monitoring (approximately $18 per child per year), as well as teacher stipends (approximately $2,400 per school). We are seeking to complement these funds with corporate social responsibility funds in case there is slow or incomplete implementation of the MINEDUB CPC policy.

Growth. To expand our reach, we seek grant funds to consolidate our curriculum and scale up in Cameroon:

Consolidate our curriculum, training, monitoring materials, and cultural adaptation strategies into an open-source toolkit for replication: $120,000 by January 2021.

Provide technical assistance to MINEDUB to refine, test, and progressively roll out the model for nationwide scale: $325,000 from January 2021-December 2023.

Innovation. To deepen our impact and produce new grounded innovations, we seek grants or partnership funds for three key activities:

Integration of caregiver training on at-home stimulation: $150,000 from January 2021-December 2023.

Integration of holistic services in water, sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, health, and protection: $150,000 from January 2021-December 2023.

Integration of leadership development program into teacher training modules: $150,000 from January 2021-December 2023.

Our estimated budget for 2020 is $210,000.

I seek the Elevate Prize in order to lead Two Rabbits through this pivotal moment in our growth.

First, I look to upskill myself and my team. My current network and team include experts in education, operations, fundraising, and evaluation, ideal for navigating our proof of concept phase. Now that we are poised to expand, we need expertise in scaling, systems strengthening, behavior change, and revenue generation. Strategic mentorship, capacity building, and connections through the Elevate Prize will help prepare us to scale.

Second, I hope to find community. I seek immersion in a group of innovators committed to global social justice, with whom I can grow as an entrepreneur and leader. As an Echoing Green fellow, it has been deeply rewarding to be part of a cohort of social entrepreneurs. The prize’s focus on elevating traditionally marginalized global issues and groups means awardees and mentors will share my passion for international solidarity and my drive to be a more effective agent of change. Third, I seek voice. The prestige and communications support that comes with the Prize will help us not only attract support to our work of decolonizing early education, but also share the stories of the incredible communities behind our innovation and impact. Based largely in the forests of Cameroon, I have lacked bandwidth to develop sophisticated digital presence or marketing strategy. Our team deserves to share their excellence with the world. 

Two Rabbits seeks guidance and partnerships for expansion, technical innovation, and advocacy.

Expansion. I would like thought partnership with the Education Development Center (EDC) to compile our current model into a toolkit for replication. Lively Minds is currently scaling up their caregiver play schemes through government handover in Ghana. I hope to learn from their experiences in refining and testing their model for scale and supporting the government to progressively take over. Results for Development integrates research into programs as they scale to inform the process and generate knowledge. I would love to engage their research team to study Two Rabbits’ integration into the MINEDUB CPC model.

Innovation. I would like to partner with behavior change experts from IDEO.org to integrate science on human behavior into our model for scale, and into our approaches to caregiver engagement for at-home stimulation. I hope to engage experts from Kidogo ECCE care centers in Kenya on strategies for integrating holistic services into CPCs, and with the Ministries of Health, Social Affairs, and Women and Family to do so.

Advocacy. I would like to engage international donors like USAID, DFID, and the World Bank to protect cultural heritage through their work. All education programs currently must demonstrate consideration of gender, children with special needs, and the environment. It is time they also include respect for indigenous languages and cultures. Finally, I seek stronger connections to indigenous education associations worldwide to strengthen global solidarity and advocacy.