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“Four days ago I visited a relative in the village, and their 2-year-old was in the house. I showed them a video of Akili washing her hands. Beyond being excited about the video, I saw that she learned something and soon after she told her mum to wash her hands to get rid of the germs. I was shocked, I saw first hand how Akili’s videos not only educate kids but also entertain them. Thank you so much Ubongo Kids!” WhatsApp message from Father in Tanzania.

A global threat like COVID-19 touches every person on the planet but disproportionately affects already struggling communities across Africa. Currently, 1,268,164,088 learners have been affected by school closures worldwide due to COVID 19. The vast majority of families in Africa do not have regular access to the internet and the only way to reach them right now is through mass media and basic mobile phones. We need your support to keep kids learning at home during this challenging time. 

Your donation will help us achieve our COVID-19 response goals, which are to: 

• Support families to keep up their kids’ learning and wellbeing at home. (NOTE: Our goal is to keep kids learning and developing skills, but we cannot expect to replace school & match curriculum step by step, with them returning as if school was not missed. Parents cannot be expected to be classroom teachers.) 
• Share critical health messages and provide COVID-19 specific social and emotional support for families across Sub-Saharan Africa during these stressful times.
• Support partners in the public and private sector with resources and guidance to utilize mass media & technology to promote health, wellbeing and  home learning. 

What we’ve done so far:

Download the pdf above

If you’d like to support our work during this critical time, please make a donation at: https://ubongo.networkforgood.com/ and share this message with your networks. 

Together, we can continue to give the gift of learning to millions of kids across Africa!

Thank you!

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1. We are offering our library of TV and radio edutainment content- as well as public service announcements and educational videos to support health and hygiene– for free, to any broadcasters and partners who can share it with communities in need. Please contact kriyen@ubongo.org for more details on the terms and conditions as well as links to the content. 

2.  We officially launched our Ubongo Toolkits platform this month, and we are working to populate it with even more content and guidance for caregivers to use at home to support learning for kids. Ubongo Toolkits is a large library of quality, African-made early learning materials and educational resources for kids aged 0 – 14, covering various topics from early numeracy, pre-literacy, and social and emotional skills to engineering, science, and technology. These materials are currently available in Kiswahili and English, and we’re also in production on versions in Kinyarwanda, Hausa, Kikuyu, Luo, and Chichewa. These toolkits serve as teaching aids for the purpose of improving the quality of instruction with play-based visual and audio learning. We have arranged the resources according to subjects and themes, so it’s easy for you to find what you are looking for. Just follow this link to log in/sign up, and explore and download our resources, free of charge. 

3.  We are also working on mapping our content and other learning resources (ebooks, apps, worksheets) against the education curriculums (pre-primary to grade 7) in African countries where schools have been closed. We are currently focusing on Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania as priority markets. This will help families quickly find content that’s relevant to their kids’ grade level and better plan lessons at home. We will add the curriculums to the Toolkits platform on an ongoing basis. 

4.  We are also working with other education and learning partners to create an inventory of learning resources to distribute on our YouTube channels, Ubongo Toolkits platforms, and broadcast channels.

5.  We In the long-term, we plan to create even more health-related content that will support public awareness and practices around hygiene and infectious disease prevention.

This is just the start, and now more than ever, we need to come together as ambassadors for children across Africa and support out-of-school kids continued learning at home. Please share this with your network and all relevant parties. We will share updates on the progress and any other initiatives that we and other partners make around this issue. Remember, “we do it for the kids”!

Support Kids Learning During COVID-19

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I write to you with excitement and a childlike sense of possibility, as we move into a new decade and set our sights on even bigger goals for Ubongo. There are now over 500 million kids in Sub-Saharan Africa, and we are more determined than ever to empower and equip them to build a brighter future for themselves and this amazing continent.

We’re setting ambitious goals, to make effective edutainment freely available to kids in all countries of Sub-Saharan Africa over the next 5 years, and scale to have reached and impacted over 60 million kids by 2025. Our vision is for a new generation of kids in Africa who have grown up with Ubongo edutainment to be more equipped with the education, critical skills, and positive mindsets to change their own lives and communities for the better. We believe that if we can support small but transformational changes in skills and mindsets for a critical mass of kids in Africa, that will lay the foundation for true and sustainable systems change on the continent. We have a clear vision, but we still have much to learn as we strive to get there. We’ll need to apply the same innovative and persistently optimistic mindset that we encourage in our learners, to our own work, as we find our way to that vision.

For this next stage of growth, we need to rethink what role each of us Ubongoers can play to best achieve that vision. I believe that I can best contribute to our long term growth by focusing on my strengths in design, innovation and linking research to practice.

So I am excited to announce that we are looking for a visionary CEO who can lead us through Ubongo’s next stage of growth and beyond. While I’ve been able to draw on my strengths as a product-builder to launch shows and services that families across Africa love, we now need an organization-builder who can help us to build a strong and sustainable Pan-African Ubongo, and develop the partnerships with innovators, funders and governments that we need for sustained impact. 

I will stay at Ubongo and transition into the role of Chief Innovation Officer, where I can continue to apply my skills and passion for storytelling and innovation to achieve our mission. I’ll focus on embedding our unique Ubongo DNA of fun learning into all we do. Those of you who know me well, know that I’m most in my element when in the “ideas room” dreaming up new stories and concepts with our team, or in the field in the testing those concepts with our users, or in the murkiness of deep-diving our stickiest and weirdest challenges. I’m excited to use these strengths to support Ubongo to achieve our big, hairy, audacious goal of bringing fun learning to ALL kids in Africa. 

We value you as supporters and thought partners, and we’re happy to share this news with you and collaborate with you as we navigate this transition to impact at scale. We are beginning a search for the right candidate, and ask you to reach out through your networks to help us find a truly exceptional CEO who can lead us through this next stage in our journey, and personifies our Ubongo values of Ubunifu, Ujasiri, Ustahimilivu, and Utu. 

We recognize that these things take time, and we’re planning for an extended timeline to find and onboard the right candidate, followed by a transition and handover period, to set our new leader and Ubongo up for long term success! 

I also encourage you to reach out to me if you have any questions or ideas about this… or just to chat and catch up. It’s been a joy to share this Ubongo journey with you, and I’m looking forward to many more years of growth and fun learning!

Okay, now back to work! 

– Nisha

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In the disturbing footage, four adult men are seen pinning down the student and violently slapping him in the face, while also hitting him with sticks all over his body. Luckily, the boy did not suffer any severe physical injuries, though the emotional and psychological damage done to him is unknown. Unfortunately, the same can not be said for 13-year-old Sperius Eradius, who died on August 27, a few days after being beaten by a teacher. His parents refused to bury him until the teacher was arrested and school principal suspended, which led to a national investigation into the incident.

According to a 2017 UNICEF report, globally, three in four children between the ages of 2 to 4 regularly experience violence committed by parents and caregivers. Moreover, six in ten children are regularly victims of corporal punishment carried out by their parents or guardians. Countries like South Africa and Kenya have outlawed corporal punishment in schools, however, there are still hundreds of reports of beatings in schools and homes from both places. And while not all cases are as severe as Sperius Eradius’s, corporal punishment is still seen as an effective way of disciplining and correcting ‘bad’ behaviour across many countries in Africa. In fact, corporal punishment has become so commonplace and normalised to the point that it’s seen as part of ‘African culture’.

Understanding Why People Beat Their Children

Most people who administer corporal punishment believe that they are helping the child, rather than harming them. They believe that children should first and foremost be obedient and respectful to adults, and the most effective way to instil this is through a beating.

In 2016, Ubongo piloted its first caregiver engagement content, PSAs, which included videos about supporting your child’s efforts and understanding that young babies are very aware and always learning. These caregiver PSAs broadcast daily within our Akili and Me broadcasts and also after the national news on TBC1.

To understand the effectiveness of the PSAs, we tried spot screening and conducting interviews with randomly selected adults in public spaces (such as bus stops). These revealed that many parents were resistant to the idea that they needed to take steps to improve their children’s early development and learning. During further surveys on the effects of the content, we found that parents valued discipline over everything from children. They wanted us to teach their children how to behave, rather than change parent’s behaviours towards children. What we heard from parents again and again was: “We need videos to address children’s bad behavior, not our behavior.”

Simply put, the problem is badly behaving children who need to be disciplined rather than parents need to change behaviour.  Moreover, a common refrain from these parents was that they wished for our programs to teach children to be more disciplined and that this would in turn make parenting easier.

Fimbo Hailei ‘The Rod Doesn’t Raise’

So we launched the “Fimbo Hailei” (The Rod Doesn’t Raise) campaign, which included a series of videos that give parents positive approaches to disciplining their children. These featured real testimonials from children about what they “learned” from being hit or beaten by their parents.

Children express confusion, often not knowing what they did wrong, and their resolutions to lie or cheat to avoid being beaten in the future. For each situation, we have a parent tell an alternative to the beating that centers around strong communication and helping the child understand what they did wrong.

To assess the outcomes from Caregiver Engagement content, we added questions to the IPSOS Omnibus Survey in Q2 2016 (before content began broadcasting) and Q2 of 2017 (after approximately 9 months of broadcast).

Listening to or watching Akili and Me correlated with higher rates of positive caregiver behaviours, which also increased greatly after broadcast of the caregiver engagement content. After broadcast of caregiver engagement content, caregivers in households where children watched Akili and Me on TV or listened to Akili and Me on radio decreased beating their children by 14%.

While this shows progress, we recognised that there was still a lot of work to be done and learning to do.

How does ‘change of behaviour’ really happen?

We all know that knowledge that I should do something is not nearly enough to change someone’s behavior. The science of behavior change is rapidly developing, and for us to create effective caregiver content, we need to learn and apply what we can from it!

BJ Fogg is founder of the behaviour design lab at Stanford. We had the chance to work  through his behaviour design framework with one of his PhD students. This has not yet been implemented, but is something worth testing for our caregiver activities.

According to Fogg’s model, “three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.”

Basically, for a behavior to happen, someone needs to:

• Be MOTIVATED to do it. The three core motivators are sensation (pleasure vs. pain), anticipation (hope vs. fear), belonging (social rejection vs. social acceptance)
• Have the ABILITY to do it (which for practical purposes means that we need to create an easy path for someone to do the behavior). The key to this is SIMPLICITY.
• Be PROMPTED to do it. Prompts need to be simple, and they can be external (like an alarm or reminder) or come from people’s daily routines.

With our caregiver engagement content we can think about how to encourage motivation through our messaging, improve ability by simplifying the path/ task, and prompt our audience either through our content or their own existing routines.

More work to be done

Corporal punishment’s effects go beyond the physical, and can impact how people behave later on in life. It can create anxiety and toxic stress in young children, which has been linked to behavioural issues like delinquency and violence later on in life. Moreover, in places like South Africa corporal punishment actually affect the economy. In a survey published in April 2017, Save the Children concluded that South Africa lost 240 billion Rand (€14.5 billion, $17 billion) because of mistreated children who suffered physical and mental injuries and couldn’t work later in life, which amounts to 6 percent of the country’s GDP.

Stories like Sperius’s will continue to happen and many go unreported. There are many children who are scarred for life because of corporal punishment, and what’s worse they often grow up to perpetuate it. As we continue to create caregiver content around nutrition, play, and brain stimulation we also are testing, iterating, and learning about methods to get caregivers in East Africa and beyond motivated and willing to change behaviours – as they are are most important allies in ensuring the protection and wellbeing of children.

Learn more about our caregiver engagement brand ‘Tunakujenga’ and its impact

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