Call for Ugandan Government & Stakeholder Engagement Consultant At Lively Minds

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.

That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven to get pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. Marginalised Mothers are given a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. In addition, during COVID we launched a new component – a local language radio programme for parents, that teaches them cost free ways to provide basic and cost-free care and education for their young children. The programme is delivered through government partners, using a training of trainers model, is cheap and highly scalable.

Over the past few years the Lively Minds programme has been delivered through local government in over 500 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda reaching over 70,000 children. The radio programme is broadcasting in 18 languages and reaching over 2m households. We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1 million children. We see this partnership as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale in Uganda and elsewhere within the next 5 years, so that we can have a transformative role in tackling the global ECD crisis.

To find out more about our programme, please visit www.livelyminds.org

Lively Minds in Uganda

In Uganda we are in 2^nd of year of a 3-year “test and transition” stage, funded by USAID, to optimise our model so that the programme can be run and funded through government. We are piloting this across Mayuge district.

Our implementation model involves training District and Sub-County teams to run the programme. Specifically, Sub County teams are trained to broadcast the parenting radio programme (using scripts). They are also trained to train VHTs in each community. The VHTs in turn deliver the parenting programme to parents, and support Mothers run Play Schemes for all the preschoolers in the community. SubCounty teams provide quality assurance/supervision and ongoing training.

Our implementation and evaluation was interrupted by COVID. But currently the programme is running successfully across 6 subcounties (appx 165 communities), and we are rolling out to the remaining 6 sub counties in Mayuge over the next year. The radio programme is also broadcast weekly on Busoga One radio station.

About the Project

There is huge need for ECD programmes in Uganda, particularly in rural communities. We have a scale-ready low-cost ECD model, that has been proven through randomised control trial to improve school readiness. Our pilot is showing it is working well in Mayuge District.

Our ultimate goal is to establish a similar strategic partnership with Government of Uganda as we have in Ghana i.e. government are responsible for delivering, institutionalising into government systems and funding (with development partner support) the programme with Lively Minds providing an agreed level of technical support.

However, we have had limited success in obtaining government interest in a partnership and we need to make a decision by the end of the year about the feasibility of scaling through government in Uganda.

Therefore, the key outcomes for this consultancy are that by the end of December 2022:

· either we have an MoU in place with Government of Uganda with genuine commitment to scale & fundraise for the full programme or the radio programme only; or

· we have fully exhausted engagement avenues and can decide to focus efforts elsewhere.