Innovation Profile: iACT’s “Little Ripples” Early Childhood Development programme
We are profiling the innovations of our three HEA Stage 3 teams. Here we learn about a community-led, holistic approach to early childhood development.
2021 was the most challenging year ever faced by iACT. The entire iACT community was devastated by the tragic accident that took the lives of iACT founders and leaders, Gabriel Stauring and Katie-Jay Scott. Their vision, leadership and shining lights are an immeasurable loss and their compassion and spirit will forever be the foundation of iACT.
Gabriel Stauring founded iACT in 2005, an experience he talked to us about shortly before the accident. Responding to the Darfuri crisis by visiting refugee camps in Chad, the start of iACT was somewhat accidental (or at least not the original plan). But as he sat in a circle with refugees, inviting the community to share their stories and needs, piece by piece, a methodology to work together and address their problems emerged.
Listening to, and actually hearing, a person is the foundation for rebuilding the dignity and choice that is often lost through the journey of displacement. For iACT, it became the essential first step in an ongoing and iterative process of co-creating programmes with refugees and people affected by conflict.
In 2010, the community raised an important issue. There was little childcare and education for young children in the camps, leaving children without proper care when mothers were collecting water and firewood. iACT began to look into what was needed.
The key role of early childhood development (ECD)
There is a growing consensus that the early years of a child’s development are critical, which is leading to more attention on early childhood development and education. However, there are still relatively few adaptable and contextual ECD programmes, and even fewer ECD programmes in emergency settings. Attendance in early childhood education is only 3% in Chad and is even less likely to be accessible by refugees. During this critical stage of development, refugee children are particularly vulnerable. Relationships with responsive teachers or caregivers and consistent access to an emotionally and physically safe space to play can mitigate the impact of stressors related to living in displacement. Early childhood education can provide these.
When Katie-Jay Scott came onboard in 2007, eventually taking on the role of Executive Director in 2019, she helped iACT facilitate the creation of what is now the Little Ripples methodology and framework — trauma-informed, play-based education, that builds in components of mindfulness and peace education. The team worked with researchers and practitioners in these areas and set the challenge of creating the best ECE programme for any child, which was then contextualised with the community and available resources.
The Little Ripples methodology
The curriculum is an evidence-based framework which provides a guide for teaching through play, using the pillars of peace, helping and sharing. The framework is filled by the teachers informed by their own culture, including the selection of community songs, play-based activities, readings, and creation of their own stories. The framework approach balances sufficient structure and content whilst ensuring it is highly adaptable and suitable for scaling to multiple contexts. Play-based pedagogy is central to this. Holistic wellbeing of the child, as well as improving the cognitive, social, emotional and physical development of refugee children is built into the design. This includes trauma-informed, peace-building and mindfulness components.
How does it work on the ground?
When a new “Pond” is launched, partners and refugee communities raise awareness for anyone who wants to be a teacher. Thirty young women are trained at a time with the aim of employing 2 teachers per Pond and one Education Director to manage the Ponds, elected by the teachers. Whilst non-refugee iACT team members led the initial trainings in the pilot stage, since 2012, “veteran” refugee Little Ripples team members have been leading the sessions. Training covers practical child care activities, background on why each of the activities is important and tailoring the curriculum with their own songs, games and stories. The training is hands-on and experiential with the young women sitting in a circle, singing songs they grew up with, and developing storybooks with their own stories to use.
During training, women are asked to put themselves in the shoes of young children by actually playing group games. This has been found to be one of the most impactful elements of the Little Ripples training. The women, many of them young mothers, get to play together.
They laugh, they run, they jump, they scream and cheer, and they experience first-hand the benefits of play for children and themselves.
The term “Pond”, meaning a small body of water, was chosen to build upon the symbolism of creating “little ripples”. The location of each Pond is decided with the community leaders and families following the completion of training. The Little Ripples team, together with block leaders, identify a home space that is suitable for safely hosting young children. The family of the home then decides whether they want to be a host of the programme and commit to hosting for at least three years. The home is also altered to create a safe learning environment. This facilitates children’s participation through proximity and perceived safety, as well as reducing upfront building costs.
Each “Pond” hosts two teachers who serve 45 children from the surrounding camp block and two mothers who cook for the daily nutrition programme. Within 12 months, the veteran staff return to facilitate two further in-service teacher trainings and provide the Little Ripples team members with the LEAD With EMPATHY leadership and professional development curriculum. These trainings aim to deepen teachers’ understanding of key concepts in the science of early childhood learning and development. To ensure quality, teachers are also encouraged to rotate between Ponds to learn from how their peers are interacting with the children and enhance peer learning.
A refugee-led approach
Refugees making key decisions, such as location, timing and hours of Little Ripples Ponds, is an important part of how iACT has conceptualised refugee-led programming. Having centred the programme on ideas expressed by the community, they have built a framework by listening to and co-creating programmes with the community. They see trust as the foundation for success and this is their number one ask of new institutional partners when scaling into new countries:
Trust the community, let them learn and be on hand to help them navigate red-tape and logistical needs.
As a result of this approach, iACT heard from the community that there are very few economic opportunities for women in the camps. Against this backdrop, iACT made the decision with the Darfuri refugee community to exclusively employ women to address this inequality. Refugee women are recognised as assets in curriculum design and programme delivery. They are encouraged into leadership, through professional development and also providing opportunities for them to lead trainings and scaling as veteran staff members. For young girls to see these women in positions of leadership is also a transformational experience.
The refugee Little Ripples team in Chad lead all programme coordination. Alongside the education directors, they are responsible for the day-to-day running of the programme. The iACT team in the U.S. support directly and also through their institutional partner in Chad, Jesuit Refugee Service, who provide logistical and administrative backstopping on the ground.
Building in components on nutrition and livelihoods
Nutrition has been a priority from the outset, since at the ideation phase of Little Ripples it was identified as a gap and has important potential co-benefits with both the attendance and performance of children. As Little Ripples has scaled, one of the adaptations that has been made in response to needs has been to build in a livelihoods’ component, which generates income to cover some of the programme costs.
The Little Ripples scaling journey so far
In Chad, Little Ripples is currently running in 15 Ponds and 6 classrooms. Since piloting, the programme has also been successfully replicated and adapted in several refugee communities in other countries:
- Burundian refugees in Tanzania, in partnership with Plan International;
- Central African Republic refugees in Cameroon, through partner Jesuit Refugee Service; and
- Refugee communities in Greece in collaboration with partner Second Tree.
Overall, iACT has launched a six-classroom school and 18 Ponds in Chad, and through education partners in other countries, provided 12,892 young refugee boys and girls with quality pre-primary education, and trained more than 350 teachers and over 50 cooks. iACT has major ambitions in scaling Little Ripples, aiming to reach 1 million children by 2035.
Their approach to scaling is to follow the demand; much of which comes from word of mouth when communities hear about Little Ripples and see a difference in the children who attend. As “Oumda” Al-fateh Tarbosh, iACT’s Programme Coordinator in Chad says, “When you’re going to start a new garden, you should start it where there’s people that are ready to water it.”
The next major milestone in Little Ripples’ scaling journey is happening right now. The first solely refugee-led expansion into a new camp is underway. In January of 2022, a team of veteran refugee team members travelled by road for two days to camp Ab Nabak in Eastern Chad and completed the first teacher training, recruited and employed eight teachers and an education director, and identified the four homes and families to host the Ponds. Construction is now underway and the veteran team will identify a Camp Coordinator who will also be hired to help coordinate the entire program with a view to launching livelihood solutions after the in-service teacher training is completed. The veteran staff will lead the full package of training in this new setting. They are also laying the groundwork to expand to southern Chad where refugees from the Central African Republic are currently living. iACT plans to thoroughly document this refugee-led leadership, codifying this process, measuring the impact of refugee leadership, and disseminating lessons learned.
Felicia Lee, iACT Global Programmes Manager: “When I saw the Little Ripples School for the first time, I immediately became emotional. It was a personally momentous experience to see, in person, the programme I had read and heard so much about since becoming involved with iACT the year prior, in 2014. It was also inspirational to hear the sounds of hundreds of children happily playing and learning in an oasis of fun and peace in the middle of a long-running refugee camp. Since then, I have been able to witness the evolution of the programme.
The beauty of Little Ripples is that it transcends both grade levels and borders: its foundational principles can be applied to various school tiers, as well as to teachers and caregivers located all over the world. It has certainly been a privilege to walk alongside our friends in the eastern Chad refugee camps as they have grown into becoming the program’s experts and veterans, who are now training new team members and are regularly invited by other organizations to train teachers in other communities. This new phase of refugee-led program expansion is exciting and what iACT is all about.”
The process of being a part of the HEA has created the space and opportunity for the Little Ripples team in Chad to further strengthen their leadership and processes. iACT plans to document their refugee-led leadership, codifying the process, measuring the impact of refugee leadership, and disseminating lessons learned. Together with HEA and the Little Ripples team in Chad, iACT will work to show what’s possible when refugees have power and ownership over the programmes affecting their daily lives and futures.
