In 2021 the Government of Sierra Leone launched the Integrated Early Child Development Policy, recommending that every primary school should have a pre-primary unit, and that every child should have at least one year of early childhood education. This requires a rapid expansion of infrastructure, human resources and management capacity.
Between February and December 2024, in collaboration with the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education-ECD unit, Njala University School of Social Sciences undertook a qualitative study of current and changing practices in nurturing childcare and early child learning to identify barriers and opportunities for scaling up early childhood education in hard-to-reach communities across the country – the first study of its kind in Sierra Leone.
Key findings:
- Distance to the nearest primary school or health centre was identified as the major barrier to accessing early childhood education.
- Ensuring that children understand how to farm in the humid tropics with precarious and changing rain patterns was a recognised priority for some parents.
- Many pre-primary aged children were attending some form of education facility and many of their parents were paying privately ”less crowded classrooms”.
- There is a real divide between time-poor and time-rich carers.