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 the drivers of success at community level. Community drivers of success are important as GES-LM is a parenting programme that builds the capacity of mothers (enrolled on a parenting course) to run playschemes in school kindergartens. The mothers are also encouraged to use the knowledge and behaviours at home.
The sustained engagement and motivation of mothers is key to success, and processes to build this are baked into the programme design (such as engagement with community leaders, husbands and PTAs, and radio programmes to build community awareness and support). There is a need to build the evidence base on such community-level processes, as they are crucial to successful outcomes in an early childhood development parenting programme.