Early Childhood Development (ECD) Financing: Rwanda baseline report

This report is internal exercise at Save the Children Rwanda/Burundi Office, which was conducted as baseline for the Save the Children Rwanda/Burundi Kumwe Hub’s ECD financing programme. The baseline was conducted in September 2023 from 18 ECD centers. These centers were selected from a total of 203 center applicants to call for application to ECD grants worth of 73,000 USD.The overall goal of this baseline was to determine benchmarking capacity and knowledge of ECD centers in order to implement this programme.

Data collection was triangulated by the use of the semi-structured interviews to generate quantitative data including the capacity of ECD centers to operate businesses, their financial outlook, governance and expected impacts among children that the programme seeks to achieve. Statistical data analysis was used to deep dive the findings from those quantitative data. The observation tool was employed to gather qualitative data notably the ECD center infrastructure and pedagogical material status. Content analysis was utilized to analyze that qualitative data. The desk review was analyzed to enrich the baseline recommendations.

Findings revealed that ECD centers are more localized in urban and semi-urban settings than rural areas. Nearly all ECD centers (94%) are accredited by either Districts or Rwanda Development Board to operate legally. It was found that the majority of ECD centers (89%) offer pre-primary services and can reach pre-school overage children. Findings showed that capacity of ECD centers in terms of business planning and marketing planning significantly correlate. Worth to note that the baseline illustrated that ECD centers’ strategic plan is the lowest scored compared to their skills in planning their business and marketing spectrum. It was found that ECD centers generally draw attention to inclusive education, however they expressed the limited knowledge on offering special education and disability adapted and sensitive pedagogical teaching environment, which they stated as priority to learn.

Nearly all selected ECD centers (95%) use government ECD curriculum and can generate their financial resources from parents through school fees of their kids; but, they don’t have strong marketing strategy to attract these potential clients. It was noted that half of ECD centers operating in urban and semi-urban settings have capacity to construct more classrooms that those working in rural areas. While tentative pre-primary age children to be reached are estimated above 450 children, the findings demonstrated that rural area ECD centers accommodate more children than other centers. In terms of ECD centers ’governance, it was found that majority of senior management of ECD centers meet at monthly basis, while the meetings with teachers and other staff are scheduled weekly. Yet, the baseline ascertained that below half of ECD centers (37%) organize caregivers’ pedagogical support especially communities of practices at quarterly basis. Over 95% of selected ECD centers ’caregivers and staff are females and have served over 5 years, which raises the need for the centers to strengthen their career in the delivery of ECD services and their retention. In order to improve quality implementation of this programme, the baseline recommends Kumwe Hub:

• To encourage ECD centers to hold business registration and TIN number provided by RDB and recognized by Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) through which they are authorized to pay their taxes. Such compliance is key to support with the selected ECD centers during the life span of this programme;
• To empower ECD centers with skills to integrate disability sensitive playgrounds, play materials and pedagogical activities in order to offer quality special education and disability adapted and sensitive pedagogical teaching environment;
• To test array of tools including the harmonization of tools that ECD centers utilize to further prove quality programming and generation of convincing evidences that witness cost effective, social return on grants provided and changes in development of children including social development, emotional development, cognitive development and motricity;
• To develop guidelines that will help ECD centers master the use of grants provided effectively and in way they will contribute to generate social impacts on the lives of children and their structures;
• To mainstream Men Engage approach in order to engage fathers in caring, attending parents’ meetings and contribute to the development of their kids as mothers do;
• To build strong caliber of ECD professionalism among caregivers since majority of them can be retained over 5 years at center.