Over the past few months local data collectors, under the supervision of ICDI and our local partner in Ethiopia, Educational for Sustainable Development (ESD), have been busy visiting schools and preschools in rural and urban areas in North Shoa and Hawassa. Our target was to collect data about the psychosocial well-being of 1000 five-year children by interviewing their teachers using the ICDI tool, UPSI-5. Happy to report that we now have data about 524 girls and 476 boys.
We also interviewed school principals in 40 schools to get more insight into the school context and the challenges and opportunities faced by young children in their daily lives. Over the coming months we will be analyzing all the information exploring the differences in the well-being of girls versus boys, and between children in rural areas as compared to those growing up in urban areas.
Parents educators and health workers working together
We will be reporting on our findings in the Autumn. Based on the findings, parents educators and health workers will be working together to develop and implement action plans improve the quality of education and care in four of the locations.
ICDI has developed the UPSI-5 (Universal Psycho-Social Indicator for Five-Year-Old Boys and Girls), a simple, quick-to-administer, and thoroughly-tested tool, to measure the psychosocial functioning of large groups of five-year-old children. UPSI-5 is a highly-needed and missing complement to prevailing efforts that look exclusively at the physical aspects of children’s health, such as the ‘Under-Five Mortality Rate (U5MR)’, ‘height-for-age’ and ‘height-for-weight’, or school enrollment.
This project is made possible through the generous financial support of Dioraphte.
