Addressing early childhood care and development challenges in Vietnam.
The problem: Modern day Vietnam is a society simultaneously navigating new prosperity and opportunity, together with entrenched complexities in the areas of health, education, housing, and child protection. While modernisation has brought progress, one-third of all Vietnamese are still classified as “very poor”, and children face increased risks of dislocation from their extended families, as well as poverty and human trafficking. There are around 1.2 million children of factory workers living around the country’s industrial zones. Quality day care and public kindergarten are out of reach for these disadvantaged families, and young children are frequently left in substandard care. Home-based care (HBC) providers often come into their roles with little or no formal training in early childhood education and development.
Our intervention (2019 – 2022): Along with other funders, we supported the OneSky Factory Model that was designed to address the challenges of early childhood care and development in newly industrialised areas. Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) intended to scale the model to 10 provinces, potentially benefiting 800,000 children of factory workers. Before attempting to scale, OneSky piloted the intervention in Da Nang with three goals:
- Create a safe, nurturing, and stimulating learning environment for children of factory workers in Vietnam’s Hoa Khanh industrial zone through OneSky Early Learning Centre (ELC).
- Using ELC as base, train local HBC providers so they could deliver quality care and adopt best practices within their own centres, reaching out to the 16,000 children of factory workers in Da Nang.
- Based on this pilot, create a national model of care for children of factory workers across Vietnam.
Results:
- ELC enrolled 564 children, who continue to benefit from safe and nurturing early learning environment
- ELC employed and trained local teachers and administrators, using a curriculum developed over 20 years of OneSky’s work and adapted to serve the specific needs of children in Vietnam
- The pilot trained 948 HBC providers who now use OneSky methods and create safe and stimulating learning environments, benefitting over 23,000 children
- OneSky deployed an online learning platform 1GiaDinhLon (1BigFamily); 1,186 HBCs were onboarded onto the platform
- 242 parents were trained to support their children’s development at home
Highlight: OneSky’s steady progress in achieving the programme’s objectives led to a unique opportunity with Vietnam’s MoET. The Ministry co-designed a govt.-led implementation model of OneSky’s HBC provider training programme, starting in five new provinces in 2023.
- Lorinet Foundation supported the project planning phase, which was crucial to laying the groundwork for scaling the MoET-OneSky model across all of Vietnam.