Tanzania’s Ministry of Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups (MoCDGWSG) aims to establish an early childhood development 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 early childhood development centre stakeholders in Tanzania.
Thrive will begin this project by organising a one-day workshop in collaboration with Po-RALG and UNICEF, inviting about 30 different stakeholders from different ministries (Ministry of Education, MoCDGWSG, Po-RALG, Ministry of Health) and NGOs (e.g., BRAC, Save the Children, Children in Crossfire, Aga Khan Foundation, Catholic Relief Services, etc.) to participate. The objectives of the first workshop will be to discuss the importance and the need for early childhood development centres, to get an overview of early childhood development centre related policies, guidelines and practices already existing in Tanzania, to gain a common understanding of stakeholder expected objectives for the early childhood development centres and to discuss the constraints and opportunities that should be considered when identifying scalable and sustainable early childhood development centre model(s) for the Tanzanian context.
Guided by these insights, we will subsequently conduct an in-depth global literature review of existing evidence on scaling early childhood development centre models in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with similar constraints. We will also conduct in-depth interviews with programme implementers to gain more detailed information about interventions, including implementation, curricula and costing. We will organise a second workshop to present, discuss and review the findings tailored to the Tanzanian context and based on this evidence, we will work together with all stakeholders to jointly determine the most promising early childhood development model(s) that should be tested in a future pilot (beyond the scope of this project).
We will also support the government in adapting and developing the operational protocols, guidelines, instruments and other material required for early childhood development centre model(s) to operationalise at scale (e.g., updated guidelines, curriculum, training materials, flipbooks, etc.). We will also map out and plan next steps to support the government in moving closer to their goal of establishing an early childhood development centre in each community by 2025. This will likely include applying for additional funding to pilot and scale the identified early childhood development centre model(s).