Dear Colleagues,
Since our founding in 2014, a cornerstone of our mission at Global TIES for Children (TIES) has been to improve the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs and policies to promote children’s holistic development in crisis-affected contexts. People all over the world are now facing a global crisis, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This acute health crisis will have economic and political aftershocks for years to come. Science is our best weapon in the fight against the pandemic; it is also crucial to ensuring that children - and the people and systems that support them - can survive and thrive in the face of such unpredictability and adversity. At TIES, we are leveraging our deep knowledge of the science of child development and experience conducting research in crisis-affected contexts globally to respond to the pandemic and aftermath in four ways:
2. Advising governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on existing evidence-based strategies for promoting children’s health, learning, and well-being in crisis contexts.
- Our leadership team has worked for decades to understand how adversity impacts community, school, and family systems and child development -- and to identify interventions that support child, family, school, and community resilience. We are using this experience to help ensure that our partners are able to integrate best practices for supporting children’s learning and development into their response efforts (for example, the International Rescue Committee, BRAC, the Humanitarian Assistance Program, and the Ministry of Education of Peru).
3. Highlighting the risks to, needs of, and the opportunities to support children, caregivers, and teachers during the pandemic and the aftermath.
We are living in a world where our individual and collective health hinges on high-quality measurement of whether people have the COVID-19 virus and on rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of vaccines and treatments. Now more than ever, we must require the same standard to ensure our children’s health, well-being, and learning: valid and reliable measurement of developmental processes and holistic learning outcomes and evidence that ECD and education programs are having an impact.
Looking ahead, we will share with you, through a series of emails on the first day of every month, our lessons learned as we adapt and expand our approaches to measuring and evaluating ECD and education program impact. We are eager to learn from you as well. Finally, we hope the learning generated through our collective response efforts can contribute to upholding such a standard for children and caregivers around the world, and in so doing, create a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
Wishing you all health and safety,
Global TIES for Children