Exploring approaches to pre-primary education for children living in remote rural areas or informal urban settlements.
Access to pre-primary education in Sierra Leone is expanding at a rate of around 4%–5% per year but additional strategies are needed to avoid remote or marginalised communities being left behind.
Thrive, with Sierra Leone’s Institute for Development (IfD), is exploring community-based approaches to increasing children’s access to pre-primary education, with an emphasis on hard-to-reach families in rural areas and in informal settlements in urban areas.
The project is investigating caregiver and family perceptions of responsive caregiving and early learning for both their own children and those hosted for relatives. It is also exploring families’ experiences of related services and how services could be better designed to meet their needs, as well as different ways of providing them in varying contexts in Sierra Leone.
The project will look at informal service provision facilitated by community members, religious leaders or elders to identify opportunities for strengthening, supporting and improving informal early childhood development practices where formal pre-primary facilities do not exist.
Thrive and IfD are also collaborating with the Department of Anthropology Njala University, Eastern Technical University Kenema, University of Makeni, Northern Province and Milton Margai Technical University, Western Area on this project.
A series of blogs explore the key themes of the project:
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/diverse-settings-diverse-solutions-taking-an-ethnographic-approach-to-designing-scalable-early-childhood-development/
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/the-role-of-grandmothers-in-remote-rural-villages-in-sierra-leone/
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/child-care-in-africa-sierra-leones-early-years-experiences/
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/overcoming-obstacles-in-observational-social-science-research-in-sierra-leone/
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/reaching-the-hard-to-reach-integrating-early-childhood-development-in-sierra-leones-marginalised-communities/
https://thrivechildevidence.org/updates/building-research-capacity-to-strengthen-informal-learning-opportunities-in-sierra-leone/