IECD presents evaluation of the National Action Plan ECCE 2021-2022 |08 August 2023
The forum in full swing
Cites improvement in childminding services and lack of finance as a drawback
The Institute for Early Childhood Development (IECD) in collaboration with the sectors in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), held a short forum yesterday to present the evaluation of the fifth National Action Plan (NAP) 2021-2022 for ECCE, conducted from October 2022 to January 2023.
The forum also saw the soft launch for the sixth NAP for ECCE, for 2023-2024.
The NAP is an initiative derived from the Seychelles Framework for ECCE (2011), and is part of the national drive to place Early Childhood Development at the forefront of the country’s priorities, consistent with Unesco priorities, sustainable development goals among other international principles.
Yesterday’s forum got under way with a presentation by Dr Andre Leste, a consultant who conducted the evaluation of the NAP. It was announced that compared to last year’s 70 percent achievements in the implementation of their projects planned, this year they managed to increase it to an 84 percent outcome rate.
Dr Leste said that through the evaluations they noticed big accomplishments in ECCE. One of them was an improvement in the childminding services and also an increase in numbers of childminders and early childcare workers.
“We have also managed to collect enough data to help policy makers to make decisions concerning child care,” he stated.
Dr Leste added that there were also projects put in place to increase daycare and childminders facilities, which is a very positive outcome.
He added there were also some drawbacks which are relatively similar to previous evaluations and that is the lack of finance and resources which led to setbacks such as prolonging data collection and lack of financial support.
“A huge problem with this plan is that it does not get budgeted. This last plan came to about six to seven million rupees and get funds from other sectors. However this plan demands a lot more resources due to multiple researches, collection of data and employing specialists,” he explained.
Dr Leste added that the funds needed for the plan would have to come from grants or donors, which creates a lot of pressure on the technical team and the sectors that implement the plan.
“I believe that this is one of the points we need to address because I think we need to have a discussion with the Ministry of Finance to look at how we can fund ECCE,” he concluded.
The different projects that were looked at in the NAP included evaluation of the early childhood health profile, auditing provisions in centre-based childminding services, parental involvement in the early learning needs of children and monitoring pupils’ progress and attainment in creche, all of which had met the team's expectation.
There were also some projects that moderately did not meet expectations and that includes the monitoring of provisions for child protection in children, the provision of daycare centre facilities and the infrastructural priority needs for the community of Perseverance.
The presentation was then followed by a plenary session to get feedback from the members on the evaluation of the NAP 2021-2022.
The second half of the forum was dedicated to the soft launch of the sixth NAP ECCE 2023-2024, which was shared by the chief executive of the IECD, Shirley Choppy.
Others present for the forum were the Minister for Employment & Social Affairs, Patricia Francourt; the Minister for Youth, Sport & Family, Marie-Celine Zialor; principal secretary for Local Government, Kevin Perine; the chief executive of the National Council for Children, Yasmin Umarji; IECD board members; ECCE technical team chairperson as well as other staff and partners.
Diane Larame
Photos by Yann Dinan
