With 188 country-wide school closures, COVID-19 has affected more than 1.5 billion learners across the world. To ensure continuity of learning amidst this crisis, developing nations are devising various distance learning strategies. A summary of these initiatives (which has been detailed in a World Bank brief) is presented in the table below:

Table 1: Remote learning strategies being planned/implemented in various countries as a response to school closures due to outbreak of COVID-19 [Source: World Bank]

A couple of the abovementioned remote learning strategies are being implemented in Afghanistan by the Ministry of Education. As only a small proportion of the population in Afghanistan have access to internet and related devices, replication of the abovementioned initiatives here would have to be carefully considered as it may worsen the existing digital divide. At the same time, an opportunity has been thrust upon us to develop hi-tech, low-tech and no-tech programs which are not only part of our immediate educational response to school closures but also help us in building back a better education system for our children. One such promising low-tech response is the Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) focusing on Early Childhood Development (ECD).

Early childhood development phase (which extends till a child is eight years old) has two unique features which means a debilitating environment will have long term consequences. Prior research shows that genes determine when the circuits within the brain should develop but how it develops is based on the child’s experiences.  Interaction with others forms the essence of this experience. Interactions which are stable, predictive and caring have a positive effect on how the brain circuits develop. These parent-child interactions in the early childhood phase have life-long implications on the child. Improving the capacity of adults in ECD shall help them in nurturing kids leading to manifold benefits such as such as improved school readiness, increased retention of kids in schools and reduced disparities in learning achievements between children belonging to different socio-economic classes. ECD programs have one of the highest returns on investment among Education and Training programs. However, with limited funding and continued focus on primary education, access to organized pre-primary education remains poor in Afghanistan as in other countries of South Asia. According to Education Joint Sector Review (2018), only 1% of the children in Afghanistan attend early childhood education programs. National Education Strategic Plan (2017-21) recognizes this fact and positions pre-schooling, in the near to medium term, as a home-based learning program for children and mothers. It is here that Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) can play a role in significantly expanding access to early childhood development at low cost.

Figure1: The rate of return to investment is one of the highest in early childhood development programs [Source: Heckman and LaFontaine(2007)]

According to the Survey of the Afghan People (2019), there has been a consistent fall in the listenership of radio over the years with 59% listening to it in 2019.  However, it remains a major source of information with more than 80% listenership in South West and South Eastern Afghanistan. In a working paper on the prospects of radio based educational instruction in Afghanistan, Cheryl Benard suggests that there is merit in focusing on school readiness skills if radio is being used for home based learning. Attempts to mimic a primary or a secondary school through radio instruction especially in the absence of a teacher have failed in multiple countries. In the context of Afghanistan where regular and punctual listening of radio lessons could not be ensured, each radio lesson has to be more autonomous and less dependent on previous radio lessons. Designing such radio lessons for higher grade subjects shall be difficult.

Another key reason for focusing on early childhood development in an IRI program is that such radio lessons not only directly instructs the child but also trains the parent/caregiver in the recommended practices of early childhood education. Parents/caregivers, whether literate or not, are not passive onlookers but active participants in such a  program. Tiyende program in Malawi (Africa) is one such IRI program which, through the radio lessons, creates meaningful child-caregiver interactions.  The interactive and participatory nature of radio lessons engages children in multiple ways leading to physical, emotional, social and cognitive development with the caregiver participating in the process.  It builds the capacity of the caregiver to provide pre-school skills to the child by mostly relying on listening, responding, doing and repeating. Evaluation of Tiyende program showed that not only caregivers scored higher on measures of positive interaction with children but also kids enrolled in the program were performing at much higher level than their peers.

As our schools remain closed to curtail the spread of COVID-19, the state has a unique opportunity to start thinking on how to empower parents so that they could make their infants, crawlers, toddlers and preschoolers ready for school and for life.

View expressed in this article are of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pajhwok’s editorial policy.