News

Karuna's support for the development and education of Indian children

Date: 14 January 2010

There are 158 million children under the age of six in India, so the challenge of improving their life chances is significant but so is the potential to effect a huge number of the world’s children. For millions of India’s children the outlook is poor.

More than 80% of brain growth occurs in the period between conception and the age of 6. Under the right conditions, children develop normally, but in their absence they are more likely to suffer from a greater susceptibility to illness, and a lower IQ and educational attainment.

45% of Indian children under the age of 3 suffer from ‘stunted’ growth which means that they have not had the right nutrition for long periods of time. 23% are ‘wasted’ which means they have not had the right nutrition recently, or have been very ill. Every year, 2.1 million children under 5 die in India, and more than half these deaths could be prevented if children were well-nourished.

Karuna has been supporting efforts to care for and education some of India’s most disadvantaged pre-school children for over 20 years.

Our partners have pioneered the establishment of crèches and pre-schools in the slums of Mumbai and Pune. Over the years these centres have made a vital contribution to the health and learning outcomes for the children that have attended them. Despite our efforts crèche and pre-school provision across India continues to be severely limited in terms of both access and quality.

Only 65% of India’s preschool age children in rural areas and 52% in urban slums can access existing early childhood education resources. Karuna’s latest work is aimed at addressing the needs of children who either don’t have access to crèches and pre-schools.

Recognising that the foundations for a child’s development and learning are established very early in life (usually well before a child attends pre-school), Karun are now supporting our partners to work directly with families to improve their knowledge, skills and ability to parent their infants better.

In 26 communities in the slums of Mumbai and Pune, 6 rural tribal communities, and with migratory tribal labourers working in 5 brick factories in the Thane region of Maharashtra, our partners are providing families with children aged from 1-3 with opportunities to build new parenting skills and strengthen existing nurturing skills as they learn how to help their children to grow.

The project uses research-based, innovative learning approaches with culturally appropriate and local language based materials to support parents to help their children to learn through play and everyday interaction.

The project also creates opportunities for parents and care-givers to strengthen their own language and literacy skills, engage in critical thinking and problem solving, focussing on the key challenges associated with child development.

Parent’s enthusiasm for and satisfaction with the programme has also been extremely high and participants routinely credit it for creating real change in how they parent their children and in turn the changes in their children’s behaviour.

News of the programme’s success has travelled fast and there is already a significant and growing demand for the programme from new families and other communities.

The poor state of children’s development is one of the gravest problems facing India. Whilst the causes of poor development are multi-faceted we know that parents and care givers are central to improving the life chances and opportunities of young children.

This work draws on over two decades experience of running crèches and pre-school centres in some of India’s poorest communities, it enjoys the support of the families and communities benefitting from the project.

Karuna’s efforts to support poor families in India to improve their knowledge, skills and ability to parent their children parent has the potential to make lasting improvements to the health, learning and behaviour of India’s children.