enjuba

Vision:

We envision an Africa with responsible citizens, authentic leaders and credible change agents

Mission:

Improving literacy and executive function for Ugandan children through spelling bees, publishing locally relevant children's books and early childhood programs

Values:

Character, Responsibility, Excellence, Empathy, Discipline

The team leader is in charge of offering overall direction for the organization, supporting department heads to refine and deliver their programs and offering strategic direction and program development for the organization. In addition he is also the face of the organization engaged in all external communication with stakeholders, fundraising and partnerships development and he is also the link between management and the board.

Our proposed LEAP project is a core program for enjuba in our strategic plan and theory of change for the anticipated impact we want to create in Uganda. It is therefore a natural fit for the team to be committed to improving the various aspects of research surrounding this, because it is only through a strong evidence base that we shall be able to achieve the program objectives and goals. Because of this, the team lead and program team members are committed to be available and this the needed attention and time to achieve the projected outputs within the 12 weeks  and continue to implement the outputs to achieve the projected outcomes. The program we are submitting is something we have been working on for two years and something we hope to continue building and developing to a growth stage to be able to scale it across the country and possibly the continent.

A scalable and replicable model providing all children access to high quality early childhood education for them to thrive. 

School success in Uganda remains elusive for rural children, despite universal access to primary education. According to The National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy Action Plan of Uganda (2016-2021), all young children have the right to “security, basic nutrition, basic health care, and basic education”.  Yet the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has estimated that 68% of children in Uganda who enroll in primary school drop out before finishing the prescribed seven years, and the rate is higher for girls.   

Despite the evidence that Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs have significant positive impact on children’s later life and on the wider society, investments in such programs especially in resource poor communities, where a huge number of vulnerable children who  would benefit from them the most have been very low in Uganda as the government is not currently investing in any pre-primary education program or ECD center, which is impacting negatively on the retention and academic performance of children in the rural Uganda where 8 out of every 10 children below age 10 cannot read and comprehend.

Like many sub Saharan African countries, Uganda faces several major challenges in providing high quality and accessible education to its citizens.  Young children are at risk due to food insecurity and general health issues; According to UNICEF Uganda has one of the lowest immunization rates in East African and malnutrition and stunting are widespread. Early childhood education, when available, is privately owned and located in urban areas. Community based preschools lacks trained teachers, safe environments, and educational materials. Early education is under enrolled, with fewer than 10% of eligible children attending. As a result many of these children fail to reach their potential in cognitive  and social-emotional development yet this is one of the major factors that determine school performance and progress at a later stage in life. Many children begin grade one not ready to learn, and 30% effectively drop out in grade one before they even learn to write their own name.

There is therefore a need for scalable high-quality community based ECD programs to provide rural children with a solid foundation. Over 80% of Uganda’s population lives in rural areas and their children mostly go to public schools.

With an understanding that children learn differently, we wanted to dive in and understand how to teach them differently and therefore develop a model that would help these children to continue to develop in their individuality. 

We therefore, created a lab school pre-school with the purpose of conducting experiments and research on a) How to teach young children in a Ugandan context, and therefore develop best practices to teach them individually. To make this happen we created two classrooms with 2 teachers and ideally a maximum of 15 children. The teachers act as facilitators and observers of how children learn and respond on how to support each child accordingly; b) develop and test curricula, creating the best suitable curriculum that can be scaled across the country. This includes developing both methodologies of teaching it (pedagogy) and creating materials out of locally available resources. Through this and to support learning variability, we focus a lot of center based learning and play based learning. c) a center for teacher development, training teachers to become better and to be able to deliver learning for young children with their different learning abilities and potential. 

At the lab school we are also experimenting on extra-curricular activities like chess and music, seeking to understand what the right stage is to introduce these and what impact it has on the child’s developing brain. 

All learnings from the lab school will be packaged into a comprehensive open source model that will be scaled to rural public schools, to enable all children get a solid foundation. This makes the lab school a springboard to support early childhood programs across the country and potentially across the continent. 

We have conducted literature review and desktop research of widely available information on the internet around early childhood development and brain development that has helped inform our perspective in focusing on this solution. We also had an assessment of our growth plans based on available information and it all pointed us to investing our time and effort into early childhood education.

Here is some literature we have reviewed:

Bonney, E., Villalobos, M., Elison, J., Sung, S., Wosu, A., SSemugabo, C., Pariyo, G., Kajungu, D., Rutebemberwa, E., Hyder, A. A., & Gibson, D. (2021). Caregivers' estimate of early childhood developmental status in rural Uganda: a cross-sectional study. BMJ open, 11(6), e044708. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-044708

Grantham-McGregor, S., Cheung, Y. B., Cueto, S., Glewwe, P., Richter, L., Strupp, B., & International Child Development Steering Group (2007). Developmental potential in the first 5 years for children in developing countries. Lancet (London, England), 369(9555), 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60032-4

Kadzamira, E., Moran, D., Mulligan, J., Ndirenda, N., Reed, B., & Rose, P. (2004). Malawi: Study of Non-state providers of basic services. DFID Policy division.

McCoy, D. C., Yoshikawa, H., Ziol-Guest, K. M., Duncan, G. J., Schindler, H. S., Magnuson, K., ... & Shonkoff, J. P. (2017). Impacts of early childhood education on medium-and long-term educational outcomes. Educational Researcher, 46(8), 474-487.

Tran TD, Luchters S, Fisher J.(2017). Early childhood development: impact of national human development, family poverty, parenting practices and access to early childhood education. Child Care Health Dev. 43(3):415-426. doi: 10.1111/cch.12395. Epub 2016 Aug 17. PMID: 27535624.

Walker, S. P., Wachs, T. D., Gardner, J. M., Lozoff, B., Wasserman, G. A., Pollitt, E., Carter, J. A., & International Child Development Steering Group (2007). Child development: risk factors for adverse outcomes in developing countries. Lancet (London, England), 369(9556), 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-...

One of the studies we embarked on that was helpful in directing us in this direction, mapped the school drop out in Uganda by grade and it revealed that the biggest drop out rate is happening in grade one, at 30%. This was awake up call and pushed us to decide to invest in the early years.

Other findings continued to confirm this direction by showing that:

The first few years of human development are crucial as it is a time when somatic changes including growth and development of the brain occur.

That investing in high-quality early childhood development centers provides young children with the foundational skills needed to support grade-level learning, and it is an effective pathway to addressing the global learning crisis.

It has been demonstrated that children who have participated in early childhood education and related programs generally remain in school, are unlikely to repeat classes and their class performance is much better compared to those who have never attended pre-primary programs.

Early school learning also improves children’s health and nutritional status. The proportion of children aged less than five years of age who are underweight declines as the pre-school coverage in a country increases.

Early childhood programs also contribute towards reduction of fertility rates making the incidence of motherhood for girls aged 10–18 is much less among those who had attended pre-school as children compared to girls of the same age who had not attended pre-school.

Our goal is to provide access to quality preschool education to the 90% of children who do not have access, especially in rural Uganda. For us to achieve this goal and scale we shall need to have a cost effective and evidenced based intervention that will both be easily adopted by both public and privately run schools.

When we established the lab school, we wanted to develop a compreheinsive model based on the best practices and latest research in early childhood development and yet contextually relevant to Uganda and each individual child that will be served. After 17 months of running the lab school, sorting out the logistical needs and getting the initial users or beneficiaries of the program, we are set on gathering data/evidence to demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed curriculum, teaching methodologies and teacher development approcahes to learning variability. We know and believe that each child is different and learns differently, but also the environment in which they live and the homes they come from are affecting how they learn. In effort to give these children a solid foundation for success life, we are developing a foundational education model that can help each child to learn and reach their full potential. 

To continue on this journey, we believe that right now is the best time to strengthen the evidence base of our solution so that we can continue to invest in the right direction and quickly scale it to reach the children who need this model the most.

1. How do we educate children to gain the most critical skills to thrive in this fast -changing world?

2. How do we create a scalable, replicable and cost effective early childhood education model that also focuses on learning variability.

We hope to improve our evidence base, building on the foundational research that to now prove whether we are achieving those claims and or making progress in the right direction. We believe that LEAP fellows could help us:

• Research on how to create an education model that gives children the most critical skills to enable them thrive in this fast evolving world.

• Develop a qualitative and quantitative research design and methodology to develop case studies and co-relational studies.

• Development of a sustainable funding model for scale and replication of our solution.

After the conclusion of the LEAP Project Sprint, we shall incorporate the educational models that give children the most critical skills into our model and then test it out, measuring for evidence in our context, before adopting it for scale. 

We shall take the research and methodology and implement it to gather and isolate data to help us identify where we are making the most impact and what specific interventions co-relate with our desired impact. We shall then be able to use these learnings first and foremost to improve our programing and design and then to share with the world on what is working and not working.

Short term, our desire is to be better positioned to measure and evaluate our solution, so as to refine and improve it, and in turn this will prepare the organization to be able to create a solid scalable and replicable model that can be used to improve access to quality early childhood education across the country. 

Our team will also be equipped with knowledge and understanding on how to create and implement an evidence based model of education and how to conduct effective research and analyze data to support organizational decision making, and consequently the decision making of policy makers.

In the long term, because of this evidence based model, we shall be able to convince government to invest and scale up the model to all schools across the country.