Animated videos on parenting for early brain development – A pilot project in India

Introduction of Project

Government of India’s Early Childhood Care and Education Policy is an important recognition of the universal need for quality childcare. The policy focuses on psycho-social development of children below 6 years and school readiness. It recognises the importance of anganwadi centres as part of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). The ECCE policy prescribes various programmes from prenatal stage to six years of age, which cater to physical, motor, language, cognitive, socio- emotional and creative needs. However, in reality, both federal and provincial governments failed to put the policy into practice.

The government has allocated only half of the actual budget required to ensure effective coverage under ICDS. ICDS centres focus only on providing nutritious food and realization of immunization schedules. But all the other domains mentioned in the ECCE policy are only on paper and in reality, none of them are covered.

Anganwadi workers, village health nurses, primary health centres, govt/private hospitals do not educate parents and care givers about the importance of first 1000 days.  In the case of parents, they completely lack awareness on this aspect.

In this context, this project plays a critical role in ensuring parents, care givers and others have access to crucial information on the importance of first 1000 days. The project also proposes to use technology in the form of animated videos so as to enable them to understand the content easily and practice it.

 

Objective of Project

To empower parents and care givers in rural communities in holistic development of children (in the first 1000 days in their life) through better parenting practices 

 

Project Area coverage

The project was implemented in two blocks of Virudhunagar District of Southern India – 20 villages in Thiruchuli and 33 villages in Vembakottai block are both rural areas with a significant population belonging to most backward castes and schedule caste.

 

Project Summary

This project aimed to empower parents and care givers in rural communities, by providing information about ante natal and pre-natal practices as well as parenting for holistic development of children in the first 1000 days of life through animated videos. The videos will be based on a guide book on Learning Through Play (LTP) developed by Bala Mandir Research Foundation (BMRF) and the Network for Information on Parenting with support from UNICEF. This guide book pictorially depicts significant milestones in specific domains and includes age-appropriate psycho-social messages and parenting messages on nutrition, health and safety. SPEECH proposes to integrate the text and the pictures into animated videos with technical support from BMRF. These videos will include information on maternal health as well as practices to enhance cognitive development and psycho-social well-being from birth to two years, and used by implementing partner, SPEECH to reach out to the community.