Report
The 探花精选 (探花精选) and its partners implemented the Resilience Expansion and Active Learning in Crisis (REAL) project in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Sudan to provide Learning through Play (LtP) training and materials in settings impacted by extended COVID-19 school closures. This REAL project focused on rapidly adapting pre-existing active, play-based learning content and reached 253,079 clients, including children, parents/caregivers, teachers, and government officials.
The total costs to conduct the first round of content adaptation across the three REAL settings equaled $483,051. Dunga episodes (social-emotional learning (SEL) audio content) incurred the highest costs due to time and effort and material costs associated with translating and broadcasting episodes. Ethiopia incurred the highest costs of all REAL-implementing contexts, spending nearly 3 times as much as DRC, and 4 times as much as South Sudan. Notably, Ethiopia鈥檚 Testing phase incurred the highest cost of the four content adaptation steps and Testing across the three contexts. This is due to the added layer of Content Validation Groups for Ethiopia鈥檚 adaptation process, additional translations to accommodate the complex language landscape, and testing in each language.
Researchers concluded that the REAL intervention improved holistic learning outcomes (pre-literacy, prenumeracy, motor, and social-emotional) for pre-primary-aged children (3-6) and social-emotional outcomes for school-aged children (6-12), as well as the capabilities of local partners and government counterparts to sustain continuous co-creation and implementation of LtP.
