Executive Summary

In Ghana, most rural kids between 3-6yrs do not get quality early childhood care and education at home or at school. This harms their health, educational success, socio-emotional development, and economic productivity.

Lively Minds is on the brink of solving this problem nationwide in Ghana with an affordable, government-run model: Public Kindergarten teachers train marginalised rural parents to run free educational Play Schemes, where they teach all their communities' preschoolers using locally-made games and following a structured curriculum proven to improve learning, well-being and hygiene. Parents are also given monthly parenting workshops and weekly local-language radio broadcasts that teach them cost-free ways to provide better care for their children at home.

The program is cost-effective and sustainable, running through existing government personnel, resources, and infrastructure. Robust evaluation has shown that this model significantly improves child cognition, language, socio-emotional skills, health, and parenting practices, and also has wide benefits for the mothers and government implementers.

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Accomplishments

The Ghana Education Service have officially adopted our program and it is now operating at full-scale  in over a ¼ of all rural districts in the country and is hitting all its performance and quality targets. We’ve trained over 7000 teachers who have empowered 76,000 Mothers to bring quality care & education to over 200,000 kids each year. The radio show is broadcasting  to  over 1million parents  in 16 languages each week. Long-term sustainability is ensured by a full time project manager appointed by GES to oversee implementation and a cross-departmental Working Group with responsibility for the program. We’ve got the political will, the people-power, the operational systems and the know-how to scale the program to every rural community in Ghana and achieve monumental impact and systems change. All we need is new funding to realize our ambition of changing the future for the entire population of rural Ghana.