Programs
Building the capacity of change makers
Our programs aim to generate actionable evidence, communicate and disseminate this evidence, and build the capacity of community actors, non-governmental organization practitioners, and policy makers to create pathways out of adversity for children and adolescents.
Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child Haiti
GC-DWC Haiti serves as the Center’s flagship project and is at the forefront of cutting-edge whole child development interventions including early childhood education, mother tongue literacy, SEL, health and nutrition, systems activation, and social enterprise. The team is active in education policy, practice, and applied research.
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Project Sampoorna
The overall goal of Project Sampoorna is to build, operate, and replicate a whole child development (WCD) model for education in India through holistic systems engagement. In Telangana, the Social and Tribal Welfare Residential Education Initiative Society (the ‘Society’) envision creating outstanding residential schools that provide high-quality, holistic, and value-based education to marginalized children that will enable social mobility and empowerment. As the anchor organization for Project Sampoorna, the GC-DWC matches the Society’s vision with the tools and support they need to achieve their goals, refine their processes, and sustain them into the future.
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Faith-Based Learning Network
With 85% of the world population identifying itself as “religious,” faith communities are well-positioned to promote science-based approaches to child development and learning. Indeed, they collectively provide about 45% of education globally. Given these realities, the GC-DWC founded the Faith-based Learning Network (FLN) to identify program learning needs and promote research to address critical issues across faith traditions. The FLN is composed of religious leaders, academics, donors, and policymakers from across faith backgrounds that support faith as an enabler to ensure positive child development and education outcomes.
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SHARE: Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education
While progress has been made in recent years to conduct research that strengthens education systems in low-middle income countries (LMIC), there continue to be significant barriers to the utilization of education research to inform policy and practice. SHARE brings together education policy-makers, practitioners, researchers, and knowledge disseminators to ensure education research meets the needs of and is accessible to key stakeholders in education systems.
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Social Enterprise Initiative
Despite progress made in global development and local capacity building in the past decade, sustainability remains a key challenge for actors looking to create change and maximize impact globally. Too frequently, innovative ideas and solutions to complex issues are tied to grant cycles, with progress left to atrophy at the end of grant periods and their assured financial support. Ultimately, true sustainability in global development lies in economic independence from foreign aid and decision-making occurring within functioning, efficient systems at the local level.
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Catch-up Education
Imagine a setting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where 7 million children aged 6 - 17 are not in school (UNICEF) or in Tanzania where hundreds of refugees from Burundi flee each month to escape political violence and food insecurity (UNHCR). How can we best reach and support marginalized learners, and how can we integrate them into formal or vocational education?
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ADAPT
The youth population, aged 15-24, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the fastest-growing region in the world, is expected to double in the next 3 decades, reaching 375 million by 2030. However, development analysts have observed that the continent remains stubbornly inhospitable — politically, economically, and socially — to young people. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that by 2035, there will be more young Africans entering the workforce each year compared to the rest of the world, emphasizing the need for students to learn not only the basic reading and arithmetic skills, but also 21st Century Skills or soft skills — skills that will empower them to face a world that is continually changing.
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Play and Learning in Children’s Eyes
When children experience play as joyful, actively engaging, meaningful, iterative and socially interactive, their play is more likely to lead to deeper learning, connecting factual knowledge with real-world experiences. However, it is not always clear how children experience learning through play (LtP) or what, in their eyes, constitutes a quality LtP experience, or what fosters feelings of self-efficacy in children’s play. Far too often, adults fill the void in knowledge with assumptions about children’s perspectives. Funded by the Lego Foundation, Play and Learning in Children’s Eyes (PALICE) takes a different approach. Capturing children’s voices in this equation — their diverse experiences of learning through play across ages and geographies — is an important step towards thoughtfully building educational environments that optimize these opportunities globally.
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Be Well, Teach Well
Despite the global emphasis on improving student social and emotional learning outcomes, there is little attention paid to teachers’ well-being. Moreover, there are few validated, rigorous assessments of teachers’ well-being that can be adapted for low-resource and displacement contexts. If the global education community is truly committed to providing equitable, quality learning opportunities for students then more attention must be paid to teacher well-being, including how to assess and better support teachers’ well-being in low-resource and displacement contexts, like Uganda.
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Past Projects
As part of the Fostering Resilience Initiative, the GC-DWC wrapped up research projects in three countries—Kenya, Peru, and Colombia—in 2020. The GC-DWC also hosted our final Measuring What Matters Learning Partnership (MWM-LP) webinar in November, 2020. Additionally, in response to COVID-19, the LEGO Foundation developed a capacity-building course for educators and caregivers to respond to uncertain situations and to support their own and their children’s social and emotional learning (SEL) through play. Read more about each of these projects by following the links below.
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Strong Beginnings Haiti
Learn more about Strong Beginnings' response to COVID-19.
A Flagship Program
The University of Notre Dame (UND) has partnered for over a decade with the Haitian Catholic Church and supporting actors to improve learning outcomes for 100,000+ students in 340 schools (Read more about UND’s partnership with Haiti here). UND’s “Read Haiti” combines a robust teacher training and coaching program with a high-quality, scripted curriculum for first and second grades. Despite the measured success of this program, incoming students are woefully underprepared to receive the intervention, with limited oral language skills, understanding of phonemes, and vocabulary knowledge. Parish pre-schools, where available, are poorly run and costly.
In response to these challenges, the GC-DWC is integrating a package of early child development (ECD) interventions for children 0-5 called Strong Beginnings, to ensure that children 0-5 grow up in safe, stimulating home environments and receive a strong foundation in language development, early literacy, and math before they enter formal school. Integrated into Haitian communities through its most central networks - the family, school, and church - this intervention is a sustainable pathway to lasting change.
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Implementation of positive parenting and school readiness activities at key access points in the parish and wider community
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Extensive training of parish pre-school staff, restructuring of classroom routines, and introduction of ECD kits
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A rapid-learning model to build systematic learning into the early stages of project implementation
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Increased ECD knowledge for caregivers, clergy, and community members
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Enhanced positive parenting by caregivers in the household
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Achievement of pre-primary child development and school readiness measures for children by age 5.
Our Approach
The goal of Strong Beginnings is to improve socio-emotional learning and literacy outcomes for 25,000 children in 340 "Read Haiti" schools from 2020-2021. To achieve this, we embed positive parenting and school readiness activities at key access points in the parish and wider community: the church; faith-based counseling programs (i.e., pre-marital & baptism); school-based parent groups; and home-visitation programs. The program involves extensive training and asset development of parish leaders, teachers, and parents, utilizing printed, app-based, and play materials. These resources are in Haitian Creole and address a variety of topics ranging from healthy brain development simulations, creating safe and stimulating home environments, and school readiness. Sustainability will be enhanced by integrating this initiative in routine activities of the family-school-parish network.
Simultaneously, extensive training of parish pre-school staff, restructuring of classroom routines, and introduction of ECD kits will be undertaken to better achieve child development and learning objectives. The introduction of play and early routines will promote intellectual curiosity and help children connect words to action, express their feelings, and cooperate with others. While formal pre-schools are beyond the reach of most Haitian families, once improved, they can become experiential learning grounds for parents, teachers, and lay-persons participating in the wider school-readiness initiative.
Innovation requires rapid learning. Therefore, we promote a rapid-learning model to build systematic learning into the early stages of project implementation. This requires early data generation and rapid feedback loops in order to identify promising practices, accelerate decision-making, and improve prospects for long-term success. Through this process, programmatic learning is generated to share with partners working in similar content areas in low-resource contexts, in contrast to traditional M&E systems, which are often considered tools for accountability, with learning occurring too late in the program cycle to influence change.
Goals, Progress, and Impact
Though Strong Beginnings directly targets the development and school readiness of children ages 0-5, its whole-child, whole-community approach promises to have a significant ripple effect. On a smaller scale, the caregivers, clergy, and community members who receive training through the initiative will continue to implement the skills they learn and model them for others in their lives. Considered more broadly, research shows that investment in ECD services and policies accelerates progress towards 17 key sustainable development goals in low-income countries and fragile states, as school-ready children are more likely to complete school, get jobs, boost the economy, educate their own children, and ultimately break the cycle of poverty. The approaches evaluated through this initiative as well as its outcomes are therefore relevant to strategic efforts in Haiti focused on the country’s overall stability, particularly through the reduction of inequality and promotion of positive, sustainable growth for its future.
Not only will the GC-DWC’s work in Haiti align with and support national efforts around education and community-building, but it will also inform the implementation and refinement of ECD programs in other fragile states around the world. Rapid assessment will allow for the testing of multiple types of interventions to see what works well and what can be adapted for other circumstances, therefore benefiting the wider global community.
Resources
- Addressing Local Realities: Transforming local tools
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Trajectory of multi-year Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) research in Haiti
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Strong Beginnings Radio Programming: Recognizing radio as the most democratic and effective means of disseminating learning materials in Haiti during COVID-19, the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Haiti and the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child at the University of Notre Dame, in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services Haiti (CRS) and the Episcopal Commission for Catholic Education (CEEC), created three radio programs - a literacy program supplemented with a reading hour program, and a pre-K social and emotional learning (SEL) and parent engagement program - as part of a comprehensive approach to distance learning in a low-tech environment.
Fostering Resilience Initiative: Kenya
1.8 million
Kenyans are unemployed.
(FAO)
60%
of those Kenyans who are unemployed are under 30.
(FAO)
35%
of Kenyans emigrate for work.
(IOM, 2015)
The Fostering Resilience Initiative (FRI) activated a community-based learning and action program with the Catholic Church in rural Nyeri county in Kenya to explore if community mobilization could add value to rural based poly technic efforts. As a result, in partnership with ZiziAfrique Foundation and Logos Consult, the Fostering Resilience Project launched the Juhudi Initiative in the Mugunda ward in August 2018.
The Mugunda ward is a rural area in Nyeri county with close to 25,000 residents. After identifying the need for expanded educational and economic opportunities for youth between the ages of 15-25 years through community meetings with different local stakeholders, the main purpose of the Juhudi Initiative is to bring the community together to identify assets, skills, and resources about what can be done to better empower and provide opportunities for youth, so their primary option is not migration to urban areas.
Our Approach
FRI put together a Community Asset Mapping guide based on best practices to mobilize community members around youth assets in Mugunda Ward. Members of the FRI team trained 14 volunteer community mobilizers to carry out community asset mapping activities in their respective sublocations. The training covered asset mapping techniques such as appreciative interviewing, positive deviance, capacity inventories of individual skills, and mapping of physical and natural resources, institutions, groups, and associations. The training also included a theoretical introduction to the concept of Asset Mapping and Positive Youth Development as well as opportunities for practice and facilitation of such exercises in a group setting, including a field visit to one of the selected villages. In addition, the community asset mapping was complemented by a household survey of approximately 300 youth in Mugunda ward later. The quantitative data from the household survey offered a more statistically representative snapshot of youth issues than was possible from the community asset mapping, a qualitative approach.
Community Asset Mapping for rural youth allows organizations and communities to:
- Understand the full range of services, talents and infrastructure available to youth within a community,
- Improve the quality and efficiency of support services for youth by integrating or combining services from multiple systems, and
- Develop new services and programs based on identified assets to overcomes existing gaps.
Goals, Progress, and Impact
The long-term goal of the asset mapping and the household survey is to mount a locally-led, contextually-appropriate response to youth needs in Mugunda that is both effective and sustainable. Our hope is that this approach can serve as a model for youth empowerment in other communities in Kenya and globally.
Learning activities, including community asset mapping and a household survey, have resulted in community-identified initiatives in youth mentorship, smart agriculture, and sports engagement to improve youth skills and opportunities in the area. Keep up to date with the the Juhudi Youth Development Initiative of Mugunda’s initiatives: https://www.juhudiyouth.org/
Related Resources
Fostering Resilience Initiative: Peru
UNESCO's Peru Horizontes program was in its initial stages of development in March 2019, when the Fostering Resilience Initiative (FRI) and Horizontes met for the first time. The program works with teachers, family members, and community leaders in rural Peruvian communities to strengthen intercultural rural secondary schools and to create opportunities for rural children and adolescents. Collaboration and further discussion led to FRI’s involvement and support of the Horizontes program through ongoing research on how child resilience and social-emotional competencies are understood, measured, and acted upon in Latin America and the creation (ongoing) of locally grounded social and emotional learning (SEL) tools in culturally and linguistically distinct indigenous contexts.
Our Approach
In 2019, our research began with a secondary review of Latin American literature on resilience and SEL, and examined the theoretical underpinnings and evidence of resilience as well as SEL definitions and measurement.
Using Jon Hubbard's free listing methodology and cognitive interviewing in order to ground tools in local realities and understandings, our team conducted primary field research with local teachers, students, and parents in secondary schools to better understand resilience and social and emotional competencies.
Goals, Progress, and Impact
Horizontes' primary objective is to ensure that adolescents from four rural areas of Peru can complete their basic secondary education with a life plan based on the integral development of socio-emotional skills and technical-productive training linked to local demands and opportunities.
The findings from our research will be disseminated through national workshops, a regional convening, and an indigenous SEL measurement toolkit. Project work and the dissemination of information will continue through 2020.
Resources
Research Brief April 2020: Capturing local understanding and definitions of social and emotional learning skills for Peruvian rural youth
Fostering Resilience Initiative: Colombia
The Fostering Resilience Initiative (FRI) and Educapaz, an alliance of seven non-governmental, faith-based and academic organizations in Colombia, are collaborating to better understand the factors that impact school performance in Colombia and what mechanisms some schools use in order to promote institutional resilience. Our collaboration aims to define, identify, and measure the factors that characterize resilient schools in the context of adversity.
Our Approach
At the outset, our team developed assessment methods to identify high performing schools in conflict affected areas of Colombia and then identified quantitative indicators for ‘positive deviant schools’, which led to the identification of resilient schools.
In 2020, research teams will study these schools via in-depth qualitative methods and generate hypotheses about their positive practices and others that contribute to school resilience. This research will use a mixed-methods approach to identify factors that contribute to school resilience and generate hypotheses about the practices and processes that explain the presence of resilience in this context.
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Semi-structured interviews with principals
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Teacher/Student Well-being Survey
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Focus group with teachers, students, and the community regarding protective or resilient assets in their schools. These focus groups will use participatory ranking techniques to allow for both quantitative and qualitative data.
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School/Community Assets Mapping School Resilience Survey
Goals, Progress, and Impact
Project learning will be shared through a national working group on resilient schools and Educapaz’s advocacy report.
Resources
Research Brief April 2020: Resilience in Schools: Identifying Protective Factors in Colombian Schools
Measuring what Matters Learning Partnership
The Measuring what Matters Learning Partnership (MWM-LP) is premised on the belief that we can collectively advance education for children and adolescents growing up in adversity when program and policy leaders from different countries learn and work together. There are several key mechanisms embedded in MWM-LP to help leaders and their organizations turn strategy into successful implementation for larger populations and replication.
Key Mechanisms
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Learning and Leadership Webinars enable our global learning community to share, learn, and discuss ideas and best practices. The 2019 series focused on advancing whole child development measurement. In 2020, MWM-LP webinars will focus on program design and evaluation.
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Working Groups bring together individuals with specialized knowledge and skills who collaborate on tasks and activities in order to achieve agreed upon objectives. Current working groups are focused on co-creating, testing, and validating a common evaluation instrument; training for social-emotional learning; and “positive deviance” studies of resilient schools in post-conflict regions.
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Annual Convenings allow global partners to gather and explore the latest research, innovative practices and emerging policy approaches to create scalable pathways out of adversity for children and adolescents. Due to COVID-19, our 2020 MWM-LP Convening took place virtually and focused on program assessment and evaluation.
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Disseminations and Actionable Evidence is a priority. In 2019, MWM-LP chaired five panels at major global conferences and co-authored six articles in peer reviewed journals. In the future, the GC-DWC will enable an annual flagship Notre Dame conference on whole child development, and through faculty affiliates increase intellectual engagement and publication.
2020 Annual Convening
Although COVID-19 moved the weeklong convening to a virtual platform, partners used the time to engage in discussions over activating community systems, practical measurement, global trends in whole child development (WCD), and the framing of WCD in order to ensure inclusion of the most vulnerable children and adolescents in their work and assessments. Highlights from the week included discussions on the role of resilient education systems during COVID-19; adapting measurement frameworks to local contexts; the relationship between academic and social and emotional skills; and the development of effective communication strategies around WCD.
Read the 2020 Convening Reports:
Full Report Executive Summary Community Systems COVID-19 Discussion Summary
Explore the 2020 sessions:
- Community Systems and COVID-19 Responses
- Practical Measurement: Practitioner-focused best practices in measuring children's learning and development outcomes
- National Systems: Global Trends and Whole Child Development
- Framing WCD: The Power of How from the FrameWorks Institute
2019 Annual Convening
Entrenched in the goals of the inaugural MWM-LP Convening was the desire to support dialogue, learning, and collaboration across global partners working at different levels of the wider education systems. A focus on whole child development (WCD), through the lens of measurement and the assessment of learning, brought members together to address common challenges around integrating WCD skills into systems.
Catch-up Education Programming
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania
230,000
refugees in Tanzania who are fleeing political violence and food insecurity in Burundi.
(OCHA 2018)
With support from the European Union, the GC-DWC is undertaking a four-year study on the efficacy of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) “catch-up education” programs in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Quantitative data is being collected on large cohorts in each country and in-depth interviews undertaken with smaller samples of “high and low achievers.” This longitudinal study will provide much needed evidence on the extent to which emergency education can foster resilience in severely war-affected and uprooted children and adolescents.
Goals, Progress, and Impact
Catch-up education programs, such as the NRC’s accelerated education programs, fill an important gap for children and adolescents in crisis. Quality and inclusive education promotes resilience of refugees and the internally displaced as well as mitigates conflict, instability, and fragility.
Future data collection and analysis will explore relationships between school performance and other key variables. The NRC will use this information to better meet the holistic needs of learners, teachers, and families.