Early Childhood Innovation Accelerator
To protect and promote children’s development, one single innovative idea will not suffice. Rather, it is necessary to create a community of experts and people committed to support successful projects. La Aceleradora (The Accelerator) is a Mexican platform that fosters the employment of innovative, potentially scalable solutions to promote early childhood development in adverse contexts. It is innovative in the sense that it connects researchers and professionals around the world to put into practice early childhood projects with rigorous strategies aimed at vulnerable populations. The projects selected by La Aceleradora are given support, so that their strategies and materials can be tested and improved following a fast-cycle iteration process.
Problematic
The number of early childhood development interventions in Mexico and Latin America and the Caribbean has grown exponentially in recent decades. But protecting and promoting children’s development is a matter of quality, not just quantity: it is necessary to support initiatives during their design and implementation stages to boost their scope and effectiveness. Accelerating these processes for innovative interventions in early childhood development among vulnerable families also requires joint action from researches and from the public and private sectors. One way to effectively coordinate all these sectors is the creation of platforms that identify innovative projects with scalability potential and implement them in a rigorous manner. In the region, these platforms are still scarce or are disconnected from each other.
Solution
This project consists of a platform that promotes the use of innovative strategies to foster the development of children in vulnerable situation in Mexico. The main focus of the interventions supported by La Aceleradora is to strengthen caregivers-children interactions. Like Brazil’s First Infancy iLab, La Aceleradora is part of the Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child’ Frontiers of Innovation platform. The selected innovative strategies are offered consultancy support to design, test and improve their projects based on fast-cycle iteration –an evidence-based methodology that helps make quick adjustments– using the lessons learned from the pilot trials: at the time of creating positive impacts, you cannot wait for too long before conducting an evaluation and reorienting efforts.
Evaluation and Impact
The first project selection phase took place between 2016-2018. La Aceleradora backed three projects: Tiempo para Jugar (Playtime), Padres Muy Padres (Very Cool Dads) and Bienestar en tu Embarazo (Wellness in Your Pregnancy). These projects’ teams won access to training workshops, technical consultancy, and support from an international community dedicated to early childhood development. The second phase of project generation is beginning in 2020 and will receive technical support to execute two implementation cycles.