OECD x MLC Marketplace: Scaling Innovation for Early Childhood Development
Event co-hosted by the OECD i31 Group and the Million Lives Collective | June 28th, 2023.
Blog post written by Aurore Pasquet (OECD Innovation for Development Facility), Alice Lassman (OECD Innovation for Development Facility) and Benjamin Kumpf (OECD Innovation for Development Facility)
Investments in a child’s earliest moments can have profound and lasting effects across their lifetime, both individually and across the society they grow up into. According to research by the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Inter-American Development Bank (2018), Early Childhood Development (ECD) is a powerful investment: generating up to a seventeen-fold return for every US dollar spent. As one of the potentially most effective strategies for fostering sustainable development, working out where to invest in what becomes a crucial question. Past investments led to significant improvements in future educational achievements, health, income, and productivity (Garcia et al., 2016, 2020) in different contexts. But there is no blueprint for effective interventions. Context-sensitive innovation is needed.
On 26 June 2023, the OECD Innovation for Development Facility (INDEF) and the Million Lives Collective convened the third joint i31 ‘Innovation Marketplace’ event: a series aimed at sparking new collaborations across the development ecosystem. Hosted virtually, members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee and other funders were brought together to learn from the scaling journeys of two organisations: Lively Minds and Ubongo. The event celebrated innovations within Early Childhood Development, while highlighting the complexity of scaling proven innovations in environments of uncertainty.
Addressing Development Challenges with Innovative Solutions
Paul Hamlin, Program Officer at USAID’s Innovation, Technology & Research Hub, kicked off the event with reflections from their Development Innovation Ventures portfolio. He underscored the importance of an evidence-base when investing in innovation, and how these breakthrough innovations are important building blocks in addressing systemic development challenges. He defined innovation as any service or product outperforming its alternatives in terms of quality, speed, and cost.
Lively Minds: Leveraging Parents to Promote Early Childhood Development
Alison Naftalin, CEO of Lively Minds, presented the unique model of turning marginalised parents in rural areas into early childhood care and education providers. Lively Minds works in settings where education and play are often neglected, as parents believe their high levels of illiteracy and limited resources limit them from providing the care. Their approach involves working through government systems to train parents to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers. This is supplemented by offering parenting courses through monthly workshops and radio broadcasts to empower parents to believe in their own skills. This learning programme has been proven to enhance child development skills from problem-solving, early numeracy and literacy to nutrition and health, as well as to improve parenting practices.
The findings of a recent randomised control trial run by an academic partners with Yale University validated the effectiveness of Lively Minds' model, with marked improvements observed in cognition, health, socio-emotional skills, and parenting practices. Owing to its success, the Ghanaian government decided to integrate the programme into 61 rural districts, positively impacting 4,000 communities. Remarkably, building their scaling journey on the back of existing government staff infrastructure will allow them to keep costs low, from US $14 per year per child in set-up phase, and a target of under US $1 when in the sustain phase.
Navigating Challenges and Learning Along the Way
Implementing such an innovative programme is not devoid of challenges, from maintaining commitment and quality to grappling with resource and connectivity scarcity in remote rural settings. The journey of Lively Minds reaffirms that innovation must work within the existing reality, not an idealised vision. But they chose to adapt, and work within this reality: investing in robust project management systems, government relations, and utilising readily available mediums like radio for broad outreach. Have a look at the deck to learn more about the remarkable work!
Ubongo: Harnessing Entertainment and Mass Media for Affordable, Large-Scale Learning
Cliodhna Ryan, Ubongo’s Director of Education and Research, detailed their innovative approach—melding entertainment, mass media, and child-centred design to provide cost-effective and locally relevant learning solutions to African families. Ubongo delivers its edutainment via technologies that families already have and use, from radio and television to IVR/SMS, digital platforms, and print materials. Their ability to adapt content so smoothly to the relevant cultural, demographic and linguistic context has been key to their scaling success, ensuring that content is accessible and relevant across underserved populations.
Ubongo's success is quantifiable. At present, Ubongo reaches 32 million users monthly across 23 countries and 13 languages, with girls and young women constituting 52% of the audience. Coupled with the Ubongo Playroom App, the programme has facilitated improvements in numeracy, literacy, language skills, and health knowledge. The programme's benefits extend beyond academics—94% of active users report enhanced interpersonal and social-emotional skills in their children, 86% have noticed a significant boost in their child's academic performance, and 97% observe an improved quality of life and personal hygiene, like handwashing, among their children. Notably, these positive outcomes are replicable across different languages and demonstrated across age groups. By 2027, Ubongo aims to reach 97 million children in 48 Sub-Saharan African countries.
Facing Challenges Head-On
Ubongo's path to success was paved with a number of challenges. Localisation across the myriad languages and cultures in Africa, navigating the fragmentation of media and technology, reaching the most remote, catering their content to children across diverse learning needs, and strengthening links to formal education amidst governmental changes were all notable hurdles. The expectation of paid radio airtime—while the current programme's efficiency depends on free slots—and data collection and monitoring challenges due to a distributed approach to broadcasting, added to the list of challenges to be solved. Much of their strength has come from their continuous evidence-implementation feedback loop, co-creating their content with their audiences to respond to the unique and evolving lived experiences of children.
Lessons Learned and the Way Forward
Ubongo's journey taught the significance of collaborating with partners to develop and scale content, adapting learning programmes for deeper penetration, and strengthening organisational capacity for sustainable implementation and improvement. Ubongo's model, focused on Afrocentric, child-centred, multilingual education, influenced key stakeholders in education and has made a large-scale impact on a generation of children, inspiring and motivating them to learn. With their model so closely informed by their rigorous evidence base, outcomes are assessed through RCTs, qualitative research, surveys, and longitudinal studies.
In conclusion, investing in Early Childhood Development goes beyond mere numerical gains—it shapes futures of individuals and their societies. When innovation intertwines with early childhood education, it creates boundless opportunities and generational impacts. When scaling innovation through existing societal and government structures, the investment has the potential to create impact beyond Early Childhood Development, strengthening collaborative partnerships and delivery channels for other programs. As showcased by Lively Minds and Ubongo, the dedication to deliver easily scalable quality education to all children, irrespective of their circumstances, is an investment of immense value.
