Displaced populations, including refugees, often face challenges in accessing and receiving early childhood development (ECD) services despite their high need for them. This project seeks to contribute to global knowledge about effective ECD programming in refugee settings by studying the delivery and content of ECD services to the Rohingya population – as well as host communities – in the Cox's Bazar region of Bangladesh.

Despite progress on expanding pre-primary education enrolment in Bangladesh, there is little evidence that speaks to the quality of services, and no updated and comprehensive assessment of child development outcomes across the country. This project aims to review the quality of these initiatives to support future scaling efforts.

Early childhood development (ECD) in Bangladesh is a busy sector with multiple public and private programmes, and there are promising and interesting examples of scaled-up ECD services. This project’s research will aim to map and unpack the approval of these kinds of programmes to build an understanding of what is enabling successful uptake of certain interventions over others in the government system.

To successfully scale up early childhood development (ECD) interventions, it’s often necessary to integrate programmes into existing organizations and infrastructure and hand over implementation to the service provider. Through studies and qualitative and quantitative surveys, this project will identify the dimensions of practices and culture within local government education services that are critical for success in Ghana.

There is an underinvestment in kindergarten (KG) teachers in Ghana. Among other approaches, this project will use an ongoing impact evaluation, and quantify perceptions by and of KG teachers, to help tackle key challenges for recruitment, motivation and retention in the KG sector.

Unpaid care work plays an important role in households and communities in Ghana. This project aims to generate evidence to make sure that early childhood development (ECD) interventions don’t worsen outcomes for caregivers – particularly women.

There’s an urgent need to learn more about what it takes for children in Ghana to receive the high-quality early education that they need to Thrive. This project will carry out a study of factors relevant to the scaling of teacher training, and examine how to provide adequate INSET (in-service teacher) training at scale that will improve performance.

While Ghana is relatively advanced in its provision of pre-primary and kindergarten education, early childhood development (ECD) provision for children aged 0-3 years is still extremely limited. Through a literature review and stakeholder engagement, this project aims to identify the most promising ECD intervention that may be trialled in the country.

A Political Economy Analysis (PEA) can help gain a clearer picture of the political context in which Thrive is working. This project will conduct a PEA, helping the programme’s teams to maximize the impact of research on the early childhood development (ECD) landscape in Ghana.

In Kiribati, following a survey in 2017 which revealing major challenges to childhood health and development, Government initiatives were created to support young children to achieve their full potential. This project will conduct a fresh survey to compare data, and work to improve early childhood development (ECD) outcomes for children in Kiribati.

This project seeks to validate the Global Scale for Early Development Short Form (GSED SF), developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), for use in Kiribati. This will help establish a suite of culturally appropriate instruments that can be used by the government to monitor and evaluate child development.

The Government of Kiribati is interested in the concept of Island Child Development Coordinators. Individuals in these roles could build better knowledge of child health, development and early learning, and deliver or facilitate community playgroups. This project will research and advise on how best to implement the concept.

Sierra Leone is at an early stage in its early childhood development (ECD) journey and the country is exploring pathways to change. Under this project, we will carry out an in-depth political economy analysis (PEA+) to strengthen Sierra Leone’s ECD policy design and delivery.

Global evidence suggests that small-scale home-visit and community group-based parenting approaches delivered by Community Health Workers (CHWs) are promising child development interventions. This project aims to identify scalable ways to effectively guide and mentor CHWs when delivering complex, integrated Early Childhood Development (ECD) services.

In collaboration with Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), this project will build a comprehensive picture of the early childhood development (ECD) environment into which the new generation of children in Tanzania are born and the expected implications for child development.

This project will complement a Randomized Control Trial (RCTs) taking place in Tanzania as part of a community-based parenting programme. We will implement a process evaluation (PE) to help understand the conditions needed to deliver effective community-based early childhood development and to assess programme sustainability and scalability.

Tanzania’s Ministry of Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups (MoCDGWSG) aims to establish an early childhood development (ECD) centre for 2–4-year-old children in every community in Tanzania by 2025. Tanzania’s President Office – Regional Administration and Local Government (Po-RALG), in charge of implementing the centres, would like to ensure that the centres are effective, scalable and sustainable in the Tanzanian context. Po-RALG has asked UNICEF and Thrive for support in achieving this objective. To do so, this project will synthesise evidence and use these results to facilitate and inform discussions among various ECD centre stakeholders in Tanzania.

The government of Tanzania’s National Multisectoral Early Childhood Development Programme (NM-ECDP) signals strong intent for improving early childhood development (ECD). This project will undertake a situation analysis to support the delivery of quality ECD services at scale.