The UN Educational, Scientific Organisation (UNESCO), on Tuesday, said it was implementing an Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) project in collaboration with the Federal Government to improve childcare in community children.
Programme Specialist, Education UNESCO, Rokhaya Diawara, made this known, in a statement, in Abuja, saying that the sub-title of the project would “Play and Resilence: China-Africa collaboration project for building a peaceful and sustainable future’’.
According to Diawara, the project was funded by Victoria Charitable Foundation in China and will run from 2017 to 2019.
She said that the project was majorly targeted at rural children in Adamawa and Ebonyi States.
“In Nigeria as in the rest of the world, more children are faced with misfortunes inflicted by poverty, conflicts, displacements, loss of or separation from family members, friends, and deterioration of living conditions among others.
“Thus, the need to provide them with psychological and physical supports to let them cope with the situations by building resilience through play.
“The support helps them to demonstrate personal strengths needed to cope with adversity and become resilient.
“It is in this regards, UNESCO Abuja, in collaboration with partners is implementing a project that will contribute to strengthening the delivery of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme in Nigeria.
“This is targeted at disadvantaged children in rural communities in Adamawa and Ebonyi States,” Diawara said.
Diawara said that the project was aimed to complement existing efforts by government, non-state actors to help improve childcare, educational standard in selected communities by building their human resource capacity and materials production.
She said that the project would create more awareness on the importance of childcare and develop tools for a comfortable learning environment.
According to her, the project will also develop the capacity of teachers, caregivers, parents on implementing effective curriculum resilience building through play and foster sustainable collaborative relationships for children among families.
She added that early childhood was the period from birth to eight years old, a time of remarkable growth with brain development at its peak.
“During this stage, children are highly influenced by the environment and the people that surround them.
“ECCE therefore aims at the holistic development of a child’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and wellbeing,” he said.
The partners involved in implementing the projects are Federal Ministry of Education, National Commission for Colleges of Education and Universal Basic Education. (NAN)