The Situation
The early years for every child are critical for a succesful, productive life, and for the the progress of our country. Studies demonstrate that for every $1 invested in high quality early childhood programs, the return is between $4 - $16. Countries benefit through increased productivity, lower education costs and reduced crime.
Unfortunately, in Uganda, 90% of children between 3 and 5 years are not enrolled in pre-primary education. Most preschools are privately owned and located in urban areas. Community based preschools are under equiped, lack essentials such as clean water and toilets, receive no government funding and are operated by untrained volunteers.
As a result, more than 60% of children do not complete primary school, with half (30%) droping out in their first year of primary school, before they can even write their own name. This makes it harder for these children or their families to experience socila mobility or break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.
Our Intervention - the Lab School
To understand how children learn, and what interventions would make a signifacnt impact in their lives, we created a lab school. Here we are developing best practices to teach children, creating and refining the most suitable curriculum, teaching methodologies and materials, as well as developing to be able to effectively facilitate learning for children.
The lab school focuses on play based and center-based learning, enabling children to be able to explore learning based on a STEAM curriculum on their own. We beleive that play is the children's highest level of thinking.
We are also experimenting on extra-curricular activities like chess, music and swimming to understanding what their impact might be in developing critical thinkers and problem solvers for the new world.
Through this, we are creating a model which we are sharing with others. Currently we are sharing with Okere City and Buyiwa Primary School - Mpigi
