Featured on Ubongo visited Malaika Orphanage Centre.
Reaching children through television is good and fun but getting to work with them directly is even better. On 25 August 2015, the Ubongo research team went to the Malaika Orphanage Centre to conduct a baseline survey for our Monitoring & Evaluation our HDIF preschool literacy project. The visit was planned as part of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) training which required our team to rehearse the tools we had learnt.
Due to the cholera outbreak, all Dar schools were closed, so we made the long trek to the orphanage. The two-hour journey to the orphanage, located in Pwani district called Mkuranga, started at 6 in the morning. There were eleven of us travelling in two cars. The journey was not boring at all, we had a lot of fun! Some of the members were newcomers, so we had time to get to know each other and to familiarise ourselves with the IDELA tools.
Malaika village is awesome; the grounds, the houses, teachers, caretakers and of course the little children. Their rooms were nicely arranged and the classrooms were well designed for children to learn. Our team was filled with joy when the kids got up and greeted us. It reminded us of our childhood! The kids were eager to find out what activities we had planned for them. We divided ourselves into pairs, working with one child per pair and the assessment started right away. Both kids and assessors LOVED the games! This field experience will help us be better assessors in the future.
This experience of assessing the children under six will help us in the process of adapting the IDELA program to the Tanzanian context. Meeting and working with the children directly gave us better insights for developing our show than sitting at a desk and imagining what the kids might like. Back at the office, we analysed what worked well and what didn’t.
We thank the Malaika villagers for letting us meet with their children.
