Building resilience through play during COVID-19
Around the world, lockdowns triggered an economic crisis, and needs shifted overnight. Employee salaries and operational costs became hard to afford, threatening operators and partners to shut down and halt their delivery of education services.
For many families, the biggest concern became meeting basic needs such as nutrition and sanitation. In low socio-economic settings in particular, the focus on securing basic needs threatened to relegate children’s education to a secondary position, further adding to the risk of education disruption.
We supported partners to adapt to the changing situation and address these basic needs, providing much needed relief through supporting nutritional and operational costs. To do this, the learning through play message needed to be transmitted in new ways, from creating resources to include in food parcels to engaging parents in the 15 minutes they spent queueing up to collect them.
"You can’t absorb learning through play if you have nutritional support needs that aren’t being met...we recognised that we needed to step into that space."
Without school, children lost access to the materials they would learn and play with while many families focussed on more immediate struggles, like income, food and housing. Amidst nationwide lockdowns and strict curfews teachers could only attempt to reach these children from a distance with the help of technology.
The solutions partners experimented with were engineered purely to overcome each obstacle uncovered. For those with online access social media proved to be a widely-utilised tool, with.
But children were sat on both sides of the digital divide. It wasn’t a new problem - it’s one we’ve struggled with for decades. And those “hard-to-reach” learners were no longer the exception to the rule, but the rule itself. Lack of access to the internet or hardware couldn’t be the reason to leave learners behind anymore.
In reality, many of our “innovations” used simple strategies or lower fidelity technologies like radio or DVDs. We went back to basics, and the results were incredible.
"At least a third of the world’s schoolchildren – 463 million children globally – were unable to access remote learning when COVID-19 shuttered their schools"
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