MADRASA EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMME KENYA

MECP-K (MADRASA EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMME KENYA), established in 1986 in Mombasa, Kenya with the support of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), works to enable marginalised communities to enhance access to high-quality, gender responsive, culturally relevant, cost effective and sustainable early childhood development and education services for boys and girls aged 0-8. MECP operates as a regional programme with national entities established in Zanzibar and Uganda in 1991 and 1993, respectively. To date over 10,000 ECD (Early Childhood Development) educators have benefitted from different professional development programmes benefitting over 1 million children directly and indirectly across the three countries in East Africa. 

Mission Statement: To promote quality, community-based, culturally relevant and pluralistic ECD with underprivileged communities.  

Vision Statement: A society where all children are healthy, educated and happy. The organization core values are mutual respect, compassion, pluralism, empathy, teamwork, and accountability.  

The team lead is the Programme Director. Her role is focused on providing technical and strategic leadership of the MECP in Kenya. She is responsible for upholding MECP’s mission and values while ensuring delivery of quality early childhood care and education program delivery across MECP implementation geographies, amongst staff members, communities, and other stakeholders. With oversight from AKF she leads discussions on MECP future direction and business development.  

The team lead and supporting team comprises of members who are experts in the field of early childhood. Given the long-term approach of the MECP, the team gained adequate experience in delivering multiple quality programs on budget and on time. Allocating 2-4 hours per week for 12 weeks is a flexible plan that the team will happily plan around. The program is a permanent ECD organization actively implementing quality and innovative initiatives for over 40 years. Thus, is a valued partner to the government, and has an extensive network across the local communities, ECD sector, civil society, and schools. MECP-K continually consults with both the national and county Governments and focuses on supporting them to deliver high quality ECD care and services, a fact that ensures government ownership, leadership from the onset and sustainability beyond the life of the project. MECP-K leverages experiences and lessons from previous interventions to strengthen ongoing initiatives. Further, MECP-K leverages strength and expertise from the pool of ECD experts within AKF thus, gain access to most recent global research findings and best practices which are in turn aligned to the local context to deliver responsive, community led and government prioritized initiatives to address the most prevalent ECD issues. 

MECP-K will engage caregivers with 2-6 year olds, to develop a play kit to enhance children’s development and learning  

The socio-economic impact of COVID-19 can not be underestimated. This has been felt worldwide and more so in marginalized communities where diverse challenges already exist including health issues, nutrition and inadequate opportunities for child’s early learning and play. As parents and caregiver struggle to make ends meet, children have fewer opportunities to interact with their parents and due to the fact that families do not even have adequate play resources, children’s holistic development and learning is often compromised. In such circumstances children from marginalized backgrounds pay the heaviest price as inequalities widen. As schools reopened post covid, they embarked on a contracted calendar in order to complete the syllabus and send forth learners to the next academic calendar, hence there was less or no time allocated for children’s play.  

Caregivers from under resourced backgrounds hardly prioritize play for young children, this includes minimal appreciation and understanding of the values and importance of play for young children, social and economic constraints and lack of knowledge and skills on how to develop play developmentally items from local resources. Global research as well as local findings and experiences continue to point to the need to help children to both survive and thrive in order to transform health and human potential. Further, caregivers require support to amplify their engagement in play with their children.  

Since inception and over the 40 years of its operation, MECP-K has strengthened families and communities  to appreciate and embrace the value of play  as a powerful approach to promoting children’s  development and early learning. Specifically MECP-K delivered parents and caregivers workshops on Child development and role of parents in promoting child development. During the sessions, parents also get to understand how play is critical in enhancing children's holistic development and learning.. MECP-K also supports the establishment of child friendly play spaces in selected health facilities to promote children stimulation during recovery . Further, during the extended period of school closure as a result of the outbreak of the COVID pandemic MECP-K developed different approaches to supporting the young learners and their parents. Strategies such as whatsapp, SMS messaging and telephone conversations were used to share key messages and relevant simple activities to promote play and positive conversations between parents and their children. MECP-K continues to use experiences gained to inform programming and contribute to National discourse such as the review of the Integrated ECD Policy and content updating for the training manual for Community Health Volunteers. Key lessons for policy include leveraging multi-sectoral collaboration in ECD, working within existing structures including caregiver and community engagement at the design stage for interventions for children below 3.  

The solution that MECP-K proposes seeks to provide opportunities for children to play outside the school time and while at home. The idea is also to bring parents closer to the children and to promote their home play and learning, home based play is viewed as a potential  equalizer through providing opportunities for cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and young people through joyful, meaningful, socially interactive, and iterative experiences. Opportunities for children to play outside the school time and while at home. The idea is also to bring parents closer to the children and to promote their home play and learning, home based play is viewed as a potential  equalizer through providing opportunities for cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and young people through joyful, meaningful, socially interactive, and iterative experiences. 

MECP-K will identify 45 caregivers of children 2-6 from the participants engaged in the ongoing ‘home learning packs’ for children. The caregivers will be supported to participate in a learning forum to explore the learning questions around the importance of caregiver child play. It is anticipated that this will contribute to strengthen caregiver knowledge, skills and attitudes around playful parenting. MECP-K will leverage the learning and design thinking from the COVID response in 2020 including MECP’s ‘COVID-19 response activities’, ‘My brain power pack’, ‘Lets make a Toy’ and AKF’s Playkits to engage caregivers to and promote caregiver child playful engagement. Further, MECP-K will leverage the existing partnerships and cordial relations with the communities to strengthen appreciation of the concept of caregiver child play.  

Caregivers will be empowered to develop individualized, creative and age-appropriate play items from a play pack resource. The next steps will entail engaging caregivers in regularly using play items at home and at their convenience. The initiative will seek to document the pre and post knowledge and experiences of the caregivers to track progress and document learning to inform future programming and potential scale. MECP-K will also document the variety play items developed for the home play boxes for further reflection on the diverse play activities and games resulting there-of. 

Following the COVID-19 outbreak and the resultant prolonged school closure period MECP-K and AKF re-evaluated how to reach out the youngest children, especially the most marginalized, with early learning support from home. Multiple technology platforms were used to conduct rapid assessments to identify parents’ needs and opportunities. Thus, MECP-K developed robust parent support structure whereby parents and teachers were connected to facilitate at home-learning for young children in target geographies in Kenya. 

MECP-K leveraged the innovative use of a simple SMS technology to support parents in keeping their children engaged in and excited about learning while schools were closed. The programme began with an adaptation exercise whereby key messages from the Aga Khan Foundation’s global Covid-19 resources were modified and adapted to the Kenyan context. These important messages were simplified and sent to parents, encouraging them to engage in meaningful discussions and simple play activities with their children hence, continued learning at home. >span class="NormalTextRun SCXW32293812 BCX0">were designed into simple and creative posters that were later printed and shared caregivers with minimal literacy skills. Messages shared reached averagely 861 (641F:220M) parents in Coastal Kenya.  

Parent surveys indicate that they appreciated the key messages and play activities that served to learn and reinforce key aspects such as appreciating children’s small efforts, providing clarity to children on new information on COVID-1. Parents were equally thankful because the simple messages and play activiies served to refresh their creativity and promote opportunities for positive interactions which were critial during the difficult period of the pandemic.

In partnership with StudioAng and Nation Media, AKF developed a media strategy and content to leverage the power of play and storytelling to advance a culture of reading in Kenyan households, to share inspiring stories amongst Kenyans about how individuals and families are successfully coping with the impacts of the pandemic, and to provide an animated series that related to the lived experiences of children, parents, and communities through the Covid-19 pandemic.  One of the most exciting and popular digital outputs that was created through this media strategy was the production of a weekly television programme called Night Time Tales, a series of short episodes designed to support parents and young children in developing a joy and passion for reading which aired on Kenyan national television every Sunday evening.  

As highlighted above, MECP-K, through previous similar engagements with caregivers i.e., distribution of ‘my brain power packs’ and the ‘home play kits’ it is evident that if adequately and systematically engaged caregivers will embrace play with their children. Further, positive interactions between child and parent present a powerful opportunity for bonding and to set the foundations for language and cognitive development. It is such quality and consistent, positive child-caregiver interactions that form the basis for brain development and stimulation resulting in life-long learning and success. >span class="TextRun Highlight SCXW125126216 BCX0">availability and use of a variety of play items to provide opportunities for children to gain an early start in life. MECP-K is keen to professionally package the caregiver play innovation through documented evidence from caregiver experiences. Thus, use the information to strengthen continued learning and child development through home-based play learning.  

MECP-K is anticipating to professionally package the solution, have the opportunity to undertake a research-based approach in implementation thus, enable documentation of tailor-made recommendations and strengthen the evidence base of the proposed solution for potential scale.   

1. How might we inspire caregivers to prioritise play with their children?  

1. How might we support consistent use of simple caregiver developed play items for caregiver child interactions? 

1. How might we accelerate caregiver child play amongst project participants? 

The roll out of the Competency based Curriculum (CBC) which is anchored on seven core competences i.e. (i) Communication and collaboration; (ii) Critical thinking and problem solving; (iii) Imagination and creativity; (iv) Citizenship; (v) Digital literacy; (vi) Learning to learn; and (vii) Self efficacy requires innovative approaches to support a smooth transition. Play can effectively enhance all the seven competencies. However, play for school going children is affected by several factors. Some of these include prioritized academic performance, limited outdoor spaces and increased teacher workloads (Catron & Allen, 2008; Follari, 2011; Jackman, 2009; Morrison, 2011; Syomwene, 2017). Thus, MECP-K believes that it is timely to test assumptions related to caregiver child play and document the learnings thus, contribute to better strategies to realize CBC. Thus, MECP-K anticipates to undertake the following:  

1. Document the experiences of 45 caregivers as they developed play items for their children  

1. Observe and document the different play activities and games derived from the play items  

1. Develop key communication packages to inspire caregiver child interactions 

Given that MECP-K will deliver the intervention amongst selected caregivers, it is envisaged that the output will be realized as progress towards results in the course of implementation.  

1. Improved caregiver -child playful interactions at home.  

1. Increased availability of fun-filled play packs at home to set the foundations for life-long learning and healthy development.  

1. Enhanced opportunities for holistic child development and learning.