Building research capacity to strengthen informal learning opportunities in Sierra Leone

Currently only about 21% of children aged 3–5 in Sierra Leone have access to pre-primary education facilities, and approximately half of children in this age group are being cared for by parents without literacy skills themselves and who are unable to support formal education (World Bank 2024). Recognising the importance of early learning for school readiness and later life outcomes, the Ministry of Basic and Secondary School Education (MBSSE) in Sierra Leone, together with partners such as UNICEF, is accelerating the scale up of pre-primary education through, for example, training educators on early childhood development and play-based learning, and developing pre-primary facilities. Access to pre-primary education is now expanding rapidly, at a rate of around 4–5% per year – but even at this growth rate, it may take 10–15 years for pre-primary education facilities to reach ‘universal’ coverage. Furthermore, additional support or complementary expansion strategies will be required to avoid remote or marginalised (‘hard-to-reach’) communities being left out of this expansion.

Recognising the risk of exacerbating inequalities by overlooking these communities, Thrive, together with its local partner, the Institute for Development, is undertaking a research study focused on exploring alternative service delivery modalities that can complement or operate alongside formal government programmes. Specifically, it delves into early learning, and community attitudes and practices concerning parenting and caregiving (both for own children and children from relatives hosted by the family), as well as informal service provision facilitated by community members, religious leaders, or elders. By understanding these dynamics, the study aims to identify opportunities for strengthening, supporting and improving informal early childhood development practices and provision, with the aim of testing such programmes in subsequent phases.

Four universities in Sierra Leone are collaborating on this study. The Department of Anthropology Njala University is leading the study in conjunction with public health and social science postgraduates from Eastern Technical University Kenema, University of Makeni, Northern Province and Milton Margai Technical University, Western Area. A total of 16 research assistants and three supervisors from these four universities have been recruited not only for their qualifications and field work but also for their fluency in local languages including Krio, Mende, Themne, Mandingo, Fulani, Susu and Limba.

The senior research team has been running remote training sessions around early childhood development, safeguarding, anthropology and fieldwork for the researchers. Many researchers working in remote communities find it easier and more reliable to use WhatsApp than email. Phones are easier to charge than laptops in hard to reach communities (and less at risk of theft). So a WhatsApp group was established to share important documents, policies, updates, experiences, which has seen active participation and lively discussion.

On Saturday 11 May, after five days of remote orientation training – and despite fuel shortages , security issues, field work demands and teaching/learning commitments – the senior team from Njala University-Anthropology Dept from Bo, Southern Province were able to coordinate an in-person meeting with members of the Department of Public Health at UNIMAK, Northern Province. This enabled a discussion of upcoming field work with a sample of hard-to-reach communities across all five regions of Sierra Leone. Discussions included purposive site selection, non-participant observation approaches, interviewing caregivers, the identification of representation ‘children of the parents’ household’ versus ‘children of the extended family’, and how to hold focus groups discussion with young people, as well as with older men and women, and people of different faiths.

Principal Investigator, Professor Mary Hodges from the Thrive programme, and consultant anthropologist, Professor Paul Richards, explain more about the background of the study:

Children may be ‘hard to reach’ because they live in remote villages with un-motorable roads or in large informal settlements in rapidly urbanising settings, or if they are from minority language groups or are not growing up in the homes of their biological parents. Families living further away from existing primary schools are unlikely to seek access to pre-primary education due to distance, costs, safety concerns and time-constraints. Some such communities may not perceive formal education and/or pre-primary education to be a priority and to be an unaffordable expense given that it may hamper pressing livelihood obligations.

Children from low-income families and remote areas are already behind their more advantaged counterparts on measures of learning and child development. In 2017 the Mixed Cluster Indicator Survey in Sierra Leone found in the Western Area, near the capital Freetown, three times more children achieved the expected reading skills for their grade than in the rest of the country. Among the richest children, around 39% demonstrate foundational reading and numeracy skills, compared to 3% of the poorest children. In order for the disadvantage of children in these communities not to be perpetuated or even exacerbated by the scale-up of pre-primary education, understanding how to prepare those who do not have access to pre-primary facilities is a priority.

However, while access to formal pre-primary education in hard-to-reach communities is extremely low, many of the children who live in them do access some form of early schooling. Notably, it is estimated that approximately 60% of hard-to-reach communities are served by madrasas who take classes lasting about 2 hours a day for children from  3 years old and above. In the Northern Province, this coverage is close to 100%, and seeking some kind of alliance with these tutors of the young on early learning targets may be worth consideration, and a potential avenue for further Thrive work.

The tradition of child fostering is a second area where an alliance for early education could be forged.  Sending a child away to extended family or friends is extremely common in the Sierra Leonean context. A survey in 2014 found that, in the South and Eastern provinces, nearly 3 in 5 households from hard-to-reach villages had either sent a child aged 2–6 ‘out’ to another family, or accepted a child ‘in’, or had both sent ‘out’ and accepted ‘in’ a fostered child. Nearly 90% of these child movements were to a relative of either the father or the mother (grandparents, siblings or descendants) whilst 10 percent were sent to friends or others. A common driver of this child movement is a desire to have the child `trained’, whether in terms of values or in the form of apprenticeship to a skill or craft, as reflected in fostered children being called make loi – ‘a child sent for training’, in the Mende language. Other drivers are a desire to have the links with the wider family strengthened, and to allow children better access to education, training and ultimately employment opportunities to mitigate the negative impact of poverty.   

Even among children who remain within their parents’ households, supervision provided by grandparents, older siblings and other family members is the norm in Sierra Leone. As a result, giving foster carers and other carers guidance on responsive caregiving, early learning opportunities and on how to cooperate with educators in preparing for later school education could be worth exploring. The desire for rapid expansion of early pre-primary education requires innovation, planning and diverse resources. Our study aims to better understand current and changing perceptions and practices of early learning opportunities within this local context. The power to influence community behaviour will also be explored in order to understand who can drive or hinder change.

“The Thrive study will help identify how to increase inclusivity and enable HTR children to access early learning opportunities through ‘informal’ channels.”

— Melody, Deputy Director, MBSSE-ECD Unit