Getting to Know Your International Contacts - part 2

The Harvard University Center on the Developing Child initiated a program called the Global Children’s Initiative. The program features three key areas of the developing child:

-       Early childhood

-       Child mental health

-       Children and Crisis situations

The Global Children’s Initiative reaches outside of the United States to provide services for all children in the world.

The Global Children’s Initiative helped launch the Nucleo Ciencia Pela Infancia in Brazil. This initiative was the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child’s first effort outside of the United States. The initiative was a collaboration of the center, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. The collaboration engages in these activities:

•    Building a scientific agenda and community of scholars around early childhood development;

•    Synthesizing and translating scientific knowledge for application to social policy. This will include working with the Center’s longtime partner organization, Frameworks Institute, to effectively communicate the science of child development in the Brazilian cultural context;

•    Strengthening leadership around early childhood development through an executive leadership course for policymakers;

•    Translating and adapting the Center’s existing print and multimedia resources for a Brazilian audience.

Another project associated with the Global Children’s Initiative is the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project. This project is a collaborative effort with Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, the University of Zambia, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University launched the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) in 2009, a collaborative effort to measure the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children’s development in Zambia. The project is responsible for creating tools to assess children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development before the children start school.

In Brazil, the Global Children’s Initiative collaborated to create the Un Buen Comienzo or Good Start. This collaboration aims to improve the quality of educational offerings for 4-6 six year olds. Good Start focuses on language development, involving families in their children’s education, and health areas such as socioemotional development and improving school attendance.

Reference:

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/global_initiative/global_childrens_initiative__activities/