Imbuto Foundation and Local Administrative Entities Development Agency (LODA) have joined hands to set up 5000 new home-based Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres in 300 sectors across the country.

The home-based ECDs are expected to provide holistic care to children, including education, nutrition, and healthcare.

"One of the objectives of the programme is to address challenges in early development; from birth to six years of age which includes stunting. We will be working with local leaders and partners to reduce cases of stunting,” Sandrine Umutoni, the Director-General of Imbuto Foundation, said.

Under the new arrangement, home-based ECDs will have at least seven caregivers per site, one of them being their leader.

Each centre will work at least two hours a day caring for 10 to 15 children.

The implementation will start with 150 sectors, and later increase to 300. At the onset, there will be 2,500 sites and later increased to 5,000 next year. It is estimated that a sector will have between 10 and 20 sites, depending on demand.

The children will be taken care of in a selected home, which could be a house of one of the beneficiaries, or an alternative decent building in a given village.

The site will work an average of five to six hours, caring for children aged between two and five years. Children under two years are meant to be breastfed hence not eligible for the centres.

The beneficiaries are mainly those parents who can’t afford to holistically care for young children.

Imbuto Foundation and LODA will provide modules for training caregivers and supervisors on how to take care of the children, train them, provide toys and other equipment. The two organizations will also avail caregivers’ guides, and monitor the sites, among other roles.

The scale-up and capacity building phase will last 20 months; from November 2019 to June 2021.

The intervention follows a study that assessed the impact of Vision 2020 Umurenge Program (VUP)-which at eradicating extreme poverty and malnutrition, among other social-economic challenges.

The study established that while more income-generating projects were created, children of the project beneficiaries were still at risk of stunting, and probably not reaching their full development potential.

"We know VUP by income-generating projects, elderly allowances (inkunga y’ingoboka), loan schemes, and more. We conducted a study, with questions like ‘would this programme affect how parents take care of their children’?

We thought the project was perfect, but we have since noted areas that needed to be strengthened, including gender equality and taking care of children,” Justine Gatsinzi, LODA’s Social Protection Division Manager.

ECD centres were first initiated by the First Lady, Jeannette Kagame in 2013, with an aim to support the holistic development of children aged 0 to 6 years.

The major sectors covered were intellectual stimulation, health, and security.

The First Lady is also the Founder and Chairperson of Imbuto Foundation.

Implemented in 2007, Vision 2020 Umurenge Program is an initiative by the Government in collaboration with development partners. It is led by the Ministry of Local Government, supported by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.

Recent data indicate that 38 per cent of children are stunted, and the goal is to reduce this to 19 per cent in 2024. According to World Health Organization, the brain develops most rapidly in the first few years of a child’s life.

Jean-Paul Nyandwi, from National Early child Development Programme, speaks as Sandrine Umutoni, the Director-General of Imbuto Foundation, and Samuel Dusengiyumva, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government (left), take notes at the meeting in Kigali yesterday. / Photo: Sam Ngendahimana