Executive Summary

Children aged 3-5 need quality care and education at home and also in a group setting so that they can develop the foundational learning, health, socio-emotional skills that will equip them for school and for their future life. But most kids in rural settings in the Global South get neither. This harms their health, educational success, socio-emotional development, and economic productivity.

Lively Minds' solution is a simple, low-cost and effective way to solve these dual barriers at scale. Existing community trainers (we've used teachers and health workers) are trained to teach marginalised rural parents to run free educational Play Schemes, where they teach all their communities' preschoolers using locally-made games and following a structured curriculum proven to improve learning, well-being and hygiene. The trainers also provide monthly group parenting workshops and weekly local-language radio broadcasts that teach parents cost-free ways to provide better care for their children at home. On top of this, we have developed a comprehensive scale support package for government that builds their capacity to run and sustain the programme themselves with an ongoing cost of just $3 per child per year.

Our model is cost-effective and sustainable, running through existing government personnel, resources, and infrastructure. Robust evaluation has shown that this model significantly improves child cognition, language, socio-emotional skills, health, and parenting practices, and also has wide benefits for the mothers and government implementers.

The programme is currently being implemented by Governments of Ghana and Uganda in over 3500 communities, reaching over 120k Mothers and 320,000 kids per week. We've got the learning, the curriculum, systems and tools in place and we're now ready to replicate in a new countries so that we can reach 2million kids over the next few years.

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Accomplishments

The Ghana Education Service have officially adopted our program and it is now operating at full-scale  in over a ¼ of all rural districts in the country and is hitting all its performance and quality targets. We’ve trained over 7000 teachers who have empowered 76,000 Mothers to bring quality care & education to over 200,000 kids each year. The radio show is broadcasting  to  over 1million parents  in 16 languages each week. Long-term sustainability is ensured by a full time project manager appointed by GES to oversee implementation and a cross-departmental Working Group with responsibility for the program. We’ve got the political will, the people-power, the operational systems and the know-how to scale the program to every rural community in Ghana and achieve monumental impact and systems change. All we need is new funding to realize our ambition of changing the future for the entire population of rural Ghana.