Rehema Salum is a mother-of-one and businesswoman living in Dodoma, Tanzania. She downloaded the Akili’s Alphabet mobile app for her daughter, Brightness who is 3 years old, and used it to entertain and engage her. Now, Brightness can count to 20 in Kiswahili and sing along to Akili and Me songs. This surprised Rehema as she thought her baby was ‘just having fun’, and never expected her to learn in the process.
From the very start, when we launched Ubongo Kids in 2014, we’ve been committed to understanding caregivers’ perception and relationship to their kids’ learning. Our co-founder Nisha Ligon used to call at least 3 random Ubongo Kids viewers’ parents every weekend and ask them about their challenges, needs, and experiences. The insights we gained inspired us to create Akili and Me, as we heard again and again that parents didn’t know what to do to support their kids’ education (other than paying school fees) and to help their youngest kids learn before they started school. In addition to the lack of tools to support their kids’ education, many parents also had misperceptions about how and when kids start learning.
“At what age does your child start learning?”
For the past 3 years, we’ve been asking parents in Tanzania this question via nationally representative surveys. Only 13% of parents believed that kids start learning from the womb. Most believe that kids start learning at the age of 2, “when my child starts responding back” and many others believe that a child only starts learning when they reach school age.
90% of human brain development happens before the age of 5. If parents are not equipped or aware of the ways that they can support their kids’ development in these critical years of life, then we are already setting up the next generation for failure from the very start.
Beyond creating fun learning content for kids, we’ve used these shows to change parents’ mindsets around how kids learn and their role in their kids’ education. Ubongo Toolkits are the solution to the problem “how might we reach children in the last mile?”
We started with the pilot of Ubongo Kids Club with support from the Development Innovations Ventures where kids could come to watch Ubongo Kids and Akili and Me in their community video showing centres (video bandas). We tested various models to develop a cost-effective direct-to-community approach, however, we realized that shifting the focus to delivering Ubongo’s educational content to stakeholders in Early Childhood Development (ECD); partners, social workers, education practitioners who implement programs in the community is the scalable way to reaching more children.
With the support of the Human Development Innovation Fund (HDIF), we’ve spent the last 2 years testing and developing the Ubongo Toolkits. Our toolkits are localized educational resources for kids aged 0 – 14, covering various topics from early numeracy, pre-literacy, and social and emotional skills to engineering, science and technology. The resources cover a range of media including video, audio and printable. They are made available to caregivers, practitioners in ECD keeping the end-user needs in mind (e.g. file size of videos range from 2MBs – 20MBs only, files are named both English and Kiswahili etc) for ease of share and usability. More so we have also developed guides on how the materials can be used in different settings (classrooms, teacher training). We distribute our toolkits through a web platform, Flash drives/USB, Google drive and WhatsApp which will be further developed as use-cases on how partners can reach children with fun localized educational content!
The Ubongo toolkits will officially launch in March 2020, at the Building Brains Conference. The 2-day event will bring together diverse stakeholders in early childhood development to join forces and kickstart a new movement for early learning in Tanzania and across Africa. Post-launch, we will continue to test, learn and improve the toolkits as we get feedback from caregivers and partners in Tanzania, and beyond.
We will be distributing the toolkits via partners working in different communities across Africa, and can directly reach families and equip them with educational resources. We’re also going to have some instructional documents (how to share content, different ways to use resources etc) as part of toolkits to help partners and caregivers to navigate the platform, use and share the resources effectively.
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Ubongo is Africa's leading producer of kids' edutainment. As a non-profit social enterprise we create fun, localised and multi-platform educational content that helps kids learn, and leverage their learning to change their lives. We reach millions of families across Africa through accessible technologies like TV, radio and mobile phones.
General inquiries:
info@ubongo.org
Marketing and merchandising:
marketing@ubongo.org
Partnerships and donation:
partnerships@ubongo.org
Phone: +255 685 012 897