The Ghana Education Service Lively Minds (GES-LM) programme is an innovative early childhood development parenting programme. It supports implementation of the Government of Ghana’s early childhood development policy, which includes a focus on play-based learning and family and community engagement. At the heart of the GES-LM programme is the mobilisation and training of mothers to run playschemes in kindergarten classes and to use the parenting, hygiene and nutrition knowledge and behaviours at home.
Based on evidence of its efficacy, the GES is now scaling up the programme to all pre-schools in northern Ghana, to reach around 800,000 children. A randomised control trial (RCT) is underway to evaluate child development outcomes in the scaled-up GES-LM programme. Within this RCT, Thrive is supporting a survey module on district governance contexts and local government perceptions of GES-LM implementation, and a module on the engagement of husbands/fathers in the community-level GES-LM process.
Complementing the RCT, the qualitative study will explore lessons learned in the governance of the GES-LM programme, focused on success factors and barriers for quality implementation at scale. The analysis will be based on the insights of the key implementing stakeholders (GES and Lively Minds), at national, regional and district levels.