PAKISTAN ALLIANCE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD |
Volume 8| July-September, 2020 |
|
Transforming Society through ECD and Informed Parenting- (Piloting of the UNICEF Parental Package for ECD—Key Family Care Practices)
Pakistan Alliance for Early Childhood (PAFEC) and UNICEF had signed an agreement back in January 2020 to pilot UINICEF’s Parenting Package for ECD – Key Family Care Practices (KFCPs) in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Twenty institutional members of PAFEC were selected for this pilot and project activities had started from February. However, in the later part of March 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic hit Pakistan hard and disrupted everything. As a result, lockdowns and closures were imposed by the government to minimise the virus transmission. Holding face to face sessions was not possible due to the strict social distancing measures. This posed serious challenges for the project implementation, and there was a dire need for an alternate strategy to implement the project. The partners worked hard and those who were already acquainted with online training platforms switched to online methods of training without much difficulty and started the sessions for Frontline Educators (FLEs) online. However, majority of our partners had to first train themselves and then offer online sessions to FLEs.
Despite the challenges of internet access and availability of devices, many partners over-achieved some of their targets, but some targets were under achieved, especially conducting sessions for parents were under achieved. A summary of the progress as follows:
-769 FLEs were trained against the target of 750
- 8,135 parents were reached and trained on KFCPs against the total target of 15,000
- 157 youth representatives and 141 community leaders against the total target of 200 and 100 were trained respectively
All these trained people have now become part of ECD workforce who share their knowledge with parents, caregivers and professionals at ongoing basis. PAFEC is hoping to enter into a long-term partnership with UNICEF to offer the Parenting Package for ECD – Key Family Care Practices to the whole country.
|
|
|
|
Dr. Shahzad S. Mithani joins PAFEC as a Consultant for the project “Increasing and Upskilling ECD Workforce in Pakistan”
We are very pleased to share the news with our members that
Dr. Shahzad Mithani has joined PAFEC as an Advisor. Dr Mithani is an Educationist, Child Rights and Program Evaluation specialist, and over the last two-decades has served with academia, INGOs and as a consultant. His portfolio includes work on basic education, early childhood education (ECE) – early grades reading and mathematics, girls’ access to education, professional development of teachers, education leaders and managers. In 2019 he coordinated the review of laws on children enacted by federal and provincial governments in Pakistan against UN-CRC and SDGs for National Commission on Human Rights and UNICEF. In 2017-18 he served as the project lead on USAID funded Quality Reading Program: Time to Read project in Kyrgyz Republic. He has served in senior management positions with Save the Children; Aga Khan Education Service and worked as an Assistant Professor with Aga Khan University – Institute for Education Development. He holds Ph.D. in Education Policy and Administration.
As part of its mandate, PAFEC is working with the public and private universities and teacher education colleges to review and update existing courses, design new courses for ECD/ECCE and enhance the capacity of relevant faculty to offer these courses. This is done under an innovative project, namely, ‘Increasing and Upskilling ECD Workforce in Pakistan,’ support by the Foundation Open Society Institute (FOSI). Dr Shahzaad Mithani has been engaged to work on this project. Under this project, PAFEC is working with seven public universities and two public and one private teacher education colleges. Partnerships have been initiated with the following universities and colleges so far:
- Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi
- Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad
- Federal College of Education, Islamabad
- The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan
- The University of Haripur, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- Institute of Early Childhood Education and Development, Karachi
More universities will be added to this list in the coming weeks.
|
|
Participation in UNICEF Radio Programme |
UNICEF Pakistan has started broadcasting a radio programme, Nanhay Qadam (Meaning: Baby Steps from 1st July 2020 in collaboration with Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC). The programme focusses on Early Childhood Development and COVID-19 through sharing action oriented information and promoting key messages and practices. Ms. Khadija Khan, the CEO of PAFEC was guest speaker in the third episode which was aired on 21st July 2020. The show was aired from 4:05 pm to 5:00 pm live on www.radio.gov.pk and was streamed through 41 channels across Pakistan on FM 101, FM 93, and MW.
The theme of the show was ‘Spousal Communication’. Ms. Khadija Khan talked about the importance of spousal communication, the environment they live in, quality of their relationship, their mental and physical health and how all these factors impact the development of young children. She also gave practical tips to improve spousal communication. The programme received calls for the guest speaker, even from far flung areas of the country. She responded to the calls explaining what latest research says about spousal communication and its impact on ECD. According to the data input shared by Radio Pakistan the programme reach was more than 83 million, approximately. URL of the recording of the programme is:
|
|
Certificate Distribution Ceremony with Lift Islamabad
Lift Islamabad (LP), one of PAFEC's implementing partners of the Parenting Package for ECD organised a flag hosting ceremony and a plantation drive under the government’s Clean and Green Pakistan theme on August 14th, 2020. The ceremony was attended by Chairman of the Kashmir Committee, Honorable Shehryar Khan Afridi; Former Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir, Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan; Senator Kalsoom Perveen, and Mr. Muhammad Hamza Shafqaat, Deputy Commissioner (DC) Islamabad.
PAFEC's CEO also attended the ceremony and distributed certificates among the Frontline Educators trained by Lift Islamabad, who had implemented the ‘Parenting Package for ECD - Key Family Care Practices’.
|
|
|
Here is the latest article from the UNICEF Office of Research presenting a benefit-cost analysis:
- Even before COVID-19, at least 175 million children – nearly half of the world’s pre-primary age children and eight out of 10 children in low-income countries – were missing out on early childhood education (ECE).
- Every dollar (US$) spent on pre-primary education results in US$9 of benefits to society. Overall, a 10 percentage-point increase in the pre-primary enrolment rate is associated with an increase of 0.14 years of schooling and a 0.55 per cent reduction in primary school repetition. For a given cohort of children, such an increase yields US$1,134 of net societal benefits per individual over their lifetime.
- The median marginal cost to increase pre-primary education enrolment by 10 percentage points in low- and middle-income countries is approximately US$41.7 million annually per country. While actual costs vary substantially within and across country-income groups, these costs represent a small fraction – on average, less than 1 per cent – of public education spending.
- The COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures exacerbate the risk of children missing out on both learning and future earnings. Investing in ECE and strengthening pre-primary education systems is needed to achieve progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, decrease inequalities and drive economic growth. It is now more critical than ever that ECE be prioritized by increasing domestic budgets and international aid and improving the efficiency with which ECE programmes are delivered.
|
|
 |
Webinar on “Supporting Families & Parents to Engage Children in Meaningful Learning at Home”
PAFEC has been conducting webinars for parents, ECD practitioners and professionals since April 2020 on key themes of ECD. In this series a webinar on “Supporting Families & Parents to Engage Children in Meaningful Learning at Home” was organised in collaboration with Rupani Foundation’ in early July. Ms. Shafia Rafique, CEO, LittleFellow Daycare & Elementary School was the speaker and Ms. Khadija Khan was moderator of the session. The topics which were focused included conceptual as well as practical tips for designing age appropriate learning activities with the help low cost no cost materials at home, creating bonding between parents and children and understanding developmental needs of children. For more details visit the below links:
|
|
|
|
Webinar with VWomen
Ms. Khadija Khan, CEO, PAFEC, was guest speaker of the live session of “Janeay” with VWomen with the programme host Ms. Tannaza Sadaf. Vwomen is a sisterhood circle that helps women in businesses and aims to provide technical knowledge and skills to women in businesses. The theme of the session was ‘challenges of home schooling during COVID-19 and the needs of Early Childhood Development'. The programme host initiated the show by asking key questions about the topic, facilitating the discussion and allowing audiences to ask questions from the speaker, making the show interactive. Responding to the questions, Ms. Khadija explained the developmental stages, age appropriate milestone of ECD, its requirements and how parents can play their role to ensure optimum development of their children. She further talked about enhancing parents’ capacity through online and offline programmes. For more details, please watch the complete session in the below link:
|
|
|
|
|
National Curriculum for Early Childhood Care & Education
Ms. Khadija Khan, who is also a member of the National Curriculum Council (NCC) has been working on the National Curriculum for Early Childhood Care & Education (ECCE) since 2017. She has recently been appointed by NCC on the taskforce as a reviewer for the model books being developed for pre-primary I (Prep). She along with the other Task Force members is supervising the development of the model books, which will be implemented in the schools across the country from the academic year 2021. She was also invited a guest speaker on "One Nation One Curriculum Live Session" in which she talked about the process being followed to review and update the NCECCE. Moreover, sharing her recommendations during the session, she emphasized on the need for allocating resources to train teachers, teacher educators and to get schools ready to implement the curriculum in its true spirit.
|
|
|
|
Role of Women in Stress Management & Countering Violence
In addition to the above webinars, Ms. Khadija also spoke on ‘Role of Women in Stress Management during COVID-19’ in two different online sessions. Her talk focused on defining stress and stressors, signs of stress and key principles to avoid stress followed by key strategies and tips to manage stress. URL of the talk is:
|
|
|
|
PAKISTAN ALLIANCE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD (PAFEC) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
