Supporting Early Childhood Development Systems - Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia

Firelight has been systematically funding and building the capacity of clusters of CBOs across these three countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. Our Early Childhood Development (ECD) initiative began in 2010 with a two-year pilot in Malawi and Zambia and in 2012 expanded to include Tanzania. In 2018, we were able to expand our impact to four additional grantee-partners (formerly part of the “Strengthening primary education” cluster) in Tanzania. Within each cluster, we mentor, strengthen, and empower a Lead Partner – a community-born organization with greater capacity – to grow, lead, and mentor the cluster of CBO grantee-partners in their geographic areas. Our aim has been to help these CBOs to build, implement, evaluate, document learnings from, and improve effective, replicable, and potentially scalable community-based ECD centers and family-based training programs that are of high quality and provide integrated services for vulnerable children from birth to 5 years of age and families. We also work to build our CBO grantee-partners’ capacity to use data to improve the quality of learning and strengthen the evidence base for community-driven solutions for early childhood development. At the same time, we support CBOs to shift local norms and attitudes towards early childhood development and to sustain community support for the development and wellbeing of children and families for generations. We also support our CBO grantee-partners to actively engage with technical networks and government policymakers to advocate for evidence-based policy change at the local and national levels.