Bolstering Haitian families for a strong beginning
Haiti offers limited opportunities for formal preschool education and early childhood development, so Strong Beginnings taps into the home-school-church system to train parents on positive parenting and preparation for school. Through rigorous research and receptive learning, the initiative will identify gaps in knowledge about the effectiveness, quality, and scale of the entire community's approach and work to close those gaps.
The project will then leverage well-designed and attractive media, like radio and interactive videos, to reach and teach a large number of underprivileged children and their parents in a compelling way.
Problematic
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, and according to UNICEF data, 21.9% of children have stunted growth and come to school malnourished. Of the 77.2% of children who attend school, 49% cannot read a single word by the end of second grade. Most of the Haitian population lives in extreme destitution. In this context, holistic, community-led initiatives like Strong Beginnings offer a sustainable solution for child development and learning.
This worrying situation was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed schools in Haiti in March 2020 and set educators scrambling to keep students learning during the crisis. Distance education is a major challenge in Haiti, given how few people have access to electricity and internet.
Solution
Since radio is the most democratic and effective way to share educational materials in Haiti, the University of Notre Dame created educational radio programs with social and emotional content for preschool children. They are designed for parent participation as part of a comprehensive distance learning approach in a low technology environment. The radio programs’ main topics include: the importance of the first 1000 days in a child’s life; play and its link to brain development; positive disciplinary strategies; COVID-19 safety measures; emotional, social, and psychological well-being; and others.
Additionally, the project shared educational videos designed and produced by Blue Butterfly for the LAKOU KAJOU series, an innovative educational program in Haitian Creole, used to teach children literacy, math, science, problem-solving, and various other skills.
Evaluation and Impact
The Strong Beginnings initiative will draw on interdisciplinary research designed to find better and more cost-effective ways to align home-school-church systems, ultimately identifying child development and learning approaches that can translate to other community-oriented contexts.
Researchers will use rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate what works and for whom so they can understand how to adapt and replicate interventions in an accessible and fair way. In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of the entire community's approach, research will identify where more work is required and other potential directions for the intervention.
This learning-centric model will generate knowledge that can be used to adjust programs in a single community, in all of Haiti, and in other low-resource settings or fragile countries