PAKISTAN ALLIANCE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD
Volume 15| April-June, 2022
Message from CEO!
Dear colleagues and friends,
Greetings from PAFEC!
I hope you, and your families are keeping safe and enjoying the summer!
As a regular feature, PAFEC is sharing its key updates and achievements of this quarter with you all. In addition to this, the newsletter also includes latest research based knowledge, practices, and research articles about Early Childhood Development. Please do spare some time to read the newsletter and give us your feedback to improve it further.

Happy Reading and Stay safe!

Khadija Khan
CEO, PAFEC
Pakistan Alliance for Early Childhood(PAFEC) initiated a series of training courses in May and June 2022 to train master trainers for its institutional members. The first five-day training was held at Islamabad from 9th to 13th May 2022 and the second training was organised at Peshawar from 13th to 17th June, 2022. The third and fourth training sessions will take place in August 2022 at Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan. The training courses held so far were attended by 79 professionals, representing institutional members of PAFEC, who are working on Early Childhood Development directly or indirectly. The aim of these training courses is to provide a clear understanding of holistic development of a child with a focus on the child’s social, emotional, cognitive, language and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning, optimal development, and wellbeing.

The training encompassed early development, learning and care with a particular focus on discovering connections between theory, research, policy, and professional development. Moreover, it focuses on age and stages of child development, significance of 1st 1000 days, factors affecting brain development at early years, age appropriate milestones, positive and playful parenting, play based learning. These courses are also in line with the expectations of the Single National Curriculum Framework on Early Childhood Care & Education, global best practices, Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 4.2, Nurturing Care Framework, UN Conventions on the Rights of the Children (with a focus on the four principles, i.e., best interest of a child, non-discrimination, survival & development, and participation) and health, nutrition standards for children between the ages of Zero to eight, landscape of ECD in Pakistan, rationale for early investment and proposed ECD/ECCE programmes for Pakistan.

The training sessions were opened with the recitation from the Holy Quran, followed by introduction of the participants and course facilitators. After that a pretest was given to the participants to check their prior knowledge on ECD, followed by sharing the course outline and objectives. The objectives of the course were as following: -

  • to develop an understanding of ECD/ECCE focusing on the development and learning of a child from ages- conception to eight years.
  • to discover child development as a holistic matter through various domains such as social, emotional, cognitive, physical and spiritual for lifelong learning and wellbeing.
  • to provide foundational qualifications to become a specialized ECCE teacher, child care practitioner, advocate, entrepreneur, researcher, or a well-informed parent with knowledge of child development and learning.

PAFEC signed a contract with the National Institute of Banking & Finance (NIBAF) to integrate Financial Literacy into the Single National Curriculum at Primary Level (Grade 1-5) and for Secondary level (Grade 6-12). In addition to integrating Financial Literacy into the curriculum, PAFEC is responsible to reach out to as many as 95,000 students across the country through training teachers on Financial Literacy.

In this connection PAFEC conducted a series of workshops for curriculum mapping and developing Financial Literacy Curriculum under selected subject areas. Curriculum experts and subject specialists from Grade I to XII participated in the series of workshops and developed content for selected themes (Students Learning Objectives, suggested activities and assessment tools)
Subject experts are developing curriculum for Financial Literacy
During the quarter Khadija Khan, CEO PAFEC participated in a series of important events, which included the launch of ECD Policy Framework, a day-long conference by the Ministry of Planning, Development & Special Initiatives (MoPD&SIs), a day-long conference titled, ‘Turnaround Pakistan’. The objective of the conference was to deliberate upon key themes/drivers which are critical for the social and economic development of the country so that short to medium-term policies can be developed to fast-track the development process with the involvement of all sectors and experts.

Another important event which the MoPD&SIs and UNICEF organised was a two-day workshop, with a purpose to have a deep dive discussion on the Key Family Care Practices(KFCPs), the parental package and the M&E Framework for the KFPs. It is important to note here that PAFEC had piloted the KFCPs in Islamabad & Rawalpindi with the technical & financial support from UNICEF. The MoPD&SIs and UNICEF are planning to implement the parental package in the whole country through the government relevant departments and private sector.
Saima Rafique from Silver Oaks Schools and College Islamabad is working as leader holistic child development. She attended the five-day Training of Master Trainers organised by Pakistan Alliance for Early Childhood at the Federal College of Islamabad from May 9th to 13th, 2022. After the training each participant shared their action plan to execute the five-day training in their own context. With reference to the action plan, Saima adopted the different components of training for their Holistic Child Development Programme & conducted a training session for the faculty at the Academic Head Office in Faraz Campus on June 22, 2022.

Some of the key learning from the PAFEC training included Birthday Graph, Storytelling for Language and moral Development and developing teaching/learning materials from low cost no cost materials. A detailed presentation on Sustainable Development Goals 2030 was also made to educate the participants about the goals. Participants enjoyed the training and shared that it will help them make their daily classes more fun and informative for their students.
[Participants Enjoying the Story Session]
[Story Telling Session on Courage]
[SDGs reflected in Activities]
PAKISTAN ALLIANCE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD (PAFEC)
www.pafec.org