We created this innovation to promote playful parenting. With the arrival of the pandemic, we made the necessary adjustments to maintain an early childhood program in a remote modality in contexts with difficult physical and technological access.
Despite the pandemic, we managed to maintain contact with families through the broadcast of spots and radio programs in local and community radios. Beyond the pandemic, we discovered that this modality of promoting playful parenting has a positive impact on the acquisition of knowledge and attitudes towards early childhood playful activities. To build the model, we took advantage of our previous experiences and curriculum (Window of Life and Reach Up) that promotes playful activities in face to face modalities and adapted them to scripts with specific indicators. We produced the radio programs and short videos. We build a monitor system to verify that radios and mobile speakers were broadcasting the spots and radio programs. And also we called a sample of families to carry out a KAP (Knowledge, Attitude and Practices) survey every three months for one year. The results indicate that this remote modality is very useful to promote the Knowledge and Attitude towards playful activities.
-After our first pilot in 2020, we received funds to scale up to longer radio programs.
-We generated evidence on how the remote modality works in difficult contexts like Guatemala, and how to adapt the content to different cultures (4 Mayan languages).
-We share our first set of spots with other countries such as Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, Ethiopia and Uganda, and they adapted it to their own cultures and replicate them.
-For the next years, we plan to scale up the radio model to a country level and resume the face to face activities.
If someone wants to adopt our model, they can adapt the content to their languages and context. We could share our lessons learned. Our contact is juegaconmigogt@childfund.org and our web page juega-conmigo.org
