Equipping Caregivers with Social Emotional Learning Games for Whole Child Development

Summary: Ubongo teamed up with the International Rescue Committee to co-produce 10 short fun instructional videos that teach parents in refugee camps in East Africa different games that they can play with their children to help them develop specific social and emotional skills. The goal of the partnership was to promote the development of critical social emotional skills in children through direct caregiver engagement.

Organisation: International Rescue Committee (IRC)

Service: User-testing, script-writing, production

The Challenge

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”

Currently,  it’s estimated that over 44% of children below the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa have under-developed social-emotional and cognitive skills. This is tied to delinquency, unemployment, and lack of empathy in adulthood. SEL is linked to short and long-term outcomes, including improvements in academic achievement, behaviour, and health and decreases in aggression and substance abuse. The situation is worse for children living in severe poverty, conflict areas and refugee camps as they experience toxic stress, which affects children’s brain development in the short and long term.  However, when provided with support such as SEL interventions, the harmful impacts of exposure to violence, abuse and neglect can be stopped and even reversed.

The Context

East Africa has a long history of hosting refugee populations. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have experienced large influxes of displaced people from numerous conflicts around the region over the past decades. In Nyaragusu, the largest refugee camp in Tanzania, women, and children make up about 75% of the population (according to data from UNHCR). The International Rescue Committee has been working closely with the community and key stakeholders in the Nyaragusu to ensure that children have a safe environment to live and learn – this includes SEL interventions. Research shows that SEL is most effective in the presence of caring and supportive relationships. As a result, IRC partnered with Ubongo to create content that helps parents and legal guardians support their children’s cognitive and social development through SEL-based games.

The Partnership

As the creators of East Africa’s most popular children’s edutainment programs, Akili and Me and Ubongo Kids, Ubongo recognizes the importance of caregiver engagement in fostering well-being and educational development in our audiences. Consequently, in addition to creating content that specifically aims to help kids develop critical learning and life skills like literacy, analytical thinking, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence, we are also committed to creating localised content under our ‘Tunakujenga’ (we build you up) brand that gives parents resources and tools that help them better understand their role in the development of their children and start adapting positive parenting behaviours in their day to day life.

Sample cartoon graphics from Learning Through Play campaign that we used on social media:

In fact, after one year of broadcast of our ‘Tunakujenga Learning Through Play’ campaign from 2016 to 2017, caregivers in households where children watched Akili and Me on TV or listened to Akili and Me on radio increased in most caregiver engagement indicators. They reduced by 14% in beating their children, and increased rates of singing to their children by 12%, checking in with the student’s teacher by 8%, teaching counting by 10%, using educational technology by 8%, teaching letters by 8%, encouraging their child to draw by 7%, telling stories to their child by 3%, showing the child affection by 6% and listening to educational radio by 4%.

Ubongo’s Tunakujenga partnership with IRC aims to promote social and emotional learning for children in refugee camps by empowering caregivers in SEL through fun and engaging videos. IRC wanted to use  use games as they are not only a great way for caregivers to bond with children, but also helps children learn better through their environment and stimulation. The pilot project was focused in the Nyaragusu camp in Kiswahili and will then be dubbed into other languages to be used at other camps across the country. .

Why games and play?

Research has shown that stimulation through meaningful play can help children who are falling behind developmentally. For instance, in the 1980s, a group of American professors undertook a research study in Kingston, Jamaica to test the effects of caregiver engagement and nutrition on children who were stunted. The researchers had three test groups; one with children who were stunted; they were given nutritional supplements and stimulated through regular play. The second group was of children who were also stunted but didn’t receive any additional stimulation or nutrition. And the last group were of children who were developed at a normal rate; they served as a comparison group. Over the years, the researchers continuously monitored children. They discovered that the stunted children who had received stimulation through play and nutritional supplements had caught up with the normally developed kids. They had better jobs, wages, education, and were more socially stable.In short, the intervention in early childhood by introducing stimulation and nutrition managed to change the trajectory of the lives of these children.  

The Process

The SEL games were designed for primary school students. `The games were divided into 5  areas of social-emotional learning:

• Kujenga Akili / Brain Building
• Kutatua Ugomvi/ Conflict Resolution
• Kudhibiti Hisia / (Emotional Regulation)
• Kutokata Tamaa  / (Perseverance)
• Kushirikiana Vizuri / (Positive Social Skills)

For example, one game helps parents teach memory by arranging a  a number of objects on the floor. Letting the child look at the objects for a bit. Then asking them to close their eyes, and taking one object out, the child has to identify the missing objects. The the parent has to ask them how they learned which object was missing.

We also created visual instructions for each of the games for mothers to be able to play these games at home and remember the rules:

Ubongo helped test the videos with different caregivers and realised that changes needed to be made.

For instance, when testing the games with parents we learned that ‘repetition’ was very important for parents to understand the games. And so in the video, the rules are repeated 3 times with clear visual demonstrations. Moreover, when we tested the videos with caregivers we observed that it was very difficult for caregivers to understand the concept of playing with their children. They saw it as demeaning to them. Moreover, when they were playing the games, it was difficult for them not to get upset when a child couldn’t complete the task, and often parents would quickly begin to help the children and so they wouldn’t get it wrong. . As a result, the videos have a voiceover that guides parents through facilitating the games with their children and reminds them that the goal isn’t winning but learning together.

The videos were shared in caregiver clubs at churches, and supplementary easy-to-use material like animated SEL cards were provided for caregivers to take home. Therefore the program is powerful because respected and trustworthy members of the community teach SEL to caregivers. Moreover, caregivers are the ones passing along SEL to their children. Every user is learning from a caring and supportive relationship.

The videos go on every Saturday and Sunday morning around 9:30am between Akili and Me and Ubongo Kids, and also weekdays every day around 4:45 pm just after the national news (in our “Umuhimu wa Elimu” segment targeted at general audience). So for airtime, it’s basically however long the video is times 30 because it showed 30 times per month!

Here’s a table of the videos and their viewership:

We are now in the process of airing these videos on TV as “game of the month” and encouraging parents to send in videos/ pictures of themselves doing the games with their children. IRC will also be creating an open source android app of videos with little facilitation and training. They’ll be putting this into tablets for people in the refugee camps.

The Impact

This program is a pilot for IRC to see if they can reach and educate more caregivers through this model in other refugee camps. The content is in Kiswahili, with plans to dub it in Kinyarwanda it will be disseminated further. A more comprehensive evaluation is currently being conducted, results of which will be shared once this is complete. From preliminary conversations held with parents in the field we have found that caregivers understand the importance of playing with their children and learning through play.