Sectoral teams working on Early Childhood Care and Education projects review progress |03 December 2022
Leaders and members of the different sectoral teams working on different Early Childhood Care and Education projects featured in the 5th National Action Plan for the latter , met yesterday to review progress, to share their achievements and challenges while implementing the projects.
Marie-France Barra, the director of programme coordination and research of the Institute of Early Childhood Development( IECD), remarked that following the launch of the 5th National Action Plan for Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in 2021, soon after the different sectors have started its implementation.
‘’Now the time has come to evaluate implementation of the projects in the different sectors namely education, health, local government and community affairs, the Institute of Early Childhood Development (IECD) as a sector and social affairs,” Ms Barra said.
She went on to point out that following a review of the first year of implementation of the plan conducted in December last year the different sectors highlighted progress they were making as well as the different challenges they were facing and how they plan to overcome these. During a mid-year review conducted earlier this year, again the different sectors put forward their achievements and difficulties .
“But the majority of sectors were making good progress on their projects and most of them will be completed this year,” Ms Barra remarked.
She pointed out that the challenges were mainly related to delays in conducting research, the challenges of Covid-19 among others.
Altogether the plan consists of 16 projects – four in health, two in local government, two are social affairs related, two from education and six from IECD.
Among the first sectors to present their projects were education, local government and health. The project leader for the education projects, Cyril Pillay, detailed the two projects as ; Monitoring pupils progress attainment in crèche and empowering and enabling teachers at creche level to improve instructional practices .
Mr Pillay went on to detail the achievements of the two projects and noted the challenges as well among the limited ICT equipment in some school. But he stressed that the two projects “have brought about ground breaking results”.
As for the local government related projects they concerned the construction of crèches in different districts. Four new crèches have been built this year, a new one is expected to be constructed at Les Mamelles next year while a survey is underway at Ile Perseverance to assess the needs of the district for a new day care as there are a number of these facilities there already.
Meanwhile the ministry has expressed its commitment to continue building more day care cntres where necessary.
Yesterday’s review forum which also consisted of a plenary session ,was also the opportunity for all sectors to start considering other priorities of their sector as the IECD prepares to launch the 6th edition of its National Action Plan during the first quarter of next year.
Marie-Anne Lepathy
Photos by Louis Toussaint
