The Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED), in partnership with the Islamic University of Maldives and the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, marked the official launch of an innovative project titled 'Scaling Impact of a Play-Based Child-to-Child Approach to Make Pre-School to Primary School Transition Fun and Inclusive.' This project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Canada through the GPE Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX).
Running from July 2024 to December 2026, the project aims to enhance school readiness and ensure smooth transitions from preschool to primary school for 900 children in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. The Play-Based Child-to-Child (PBC2C) approach, at the heart of this initiative, focuses on strengthening foundational literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional as well as leadership skills in young children.
In Pakistan, the project will be led by AKU-IED faculty members Dr Nasima Shakeel in Karachi and Abdul Wali in Chitral. The initiative will engage public school teachers and children to generate context-specific knowledge, to scale the PBC2C model in diverse contexts in Pakistan. It will also focus on building the capacity of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) teachers in these regions.
The project follows a Mixed Methods Research approach and will unfold in four major phases: the baseline study, the development phase (which includes training the research team, and participating teachers, and developing the research model), and the implementation phase, where collaborative action research will be conducted. The project will conclude with the consolidation of research findings from the three consortium partner universities.
This collaboration marks a significant step towards ensuring that young children experience a smooth and inclusive transition into primary school, laying the foundation for lifelong learning.
“We have high hopes that this project will create a contextually relevant model where older children can help younger children enhance their literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills in public schools," said Dr Nasima Shakeel, Principal Investigator for the project in Pakistan. “This model has the potential to significantly improve foundational literacy, especially in low-resourced schools, single-teacher classrooms, and informal education settings for out-of-school children across Pakistan."
