School Readiness Initiative in Zambia
The main goal of the Roger Federer Foundation's School Readiness Initiative, which started in May 2019, is to provide a good start in kindergarten for vulnerable children by providing access to quality pre-schooling in community schools. School readiness refers to the skills, knowledge, attitudes and other competencies required for children to succeed in school or for later learning and living. This means that the children are ready for school, the families are also ready to support their children's learning and the schools are ready for the children.
The school readiness initiative will reach at least 228,000 disadvantaged children in 2,000 community schools. The focus is on strengthening family and community systems by focusing on promoting positive and supportive attitudes and increasing parental involvement in early learning and child development. The Roger Federer Foundation also focuses on preparing children for school by focusing on their education and development. Finally, the schools must be prepared for the children. Therefore, our focus is on improving the school environment as well as on measures that encourage and support a smooth transition of children into elementary school.
For the School Readiness Initiative, the Roger Federer Foundation has developed an Early Learning Kiosk, which is an offline tablet with several tools and apps to capacitate, in a comprehensive manner, teachers in early childhood education. The Early Learning Kiosk was received everywhere with great enthusiasm because of its cost-efficiency and flexible access to know-how and learning, allowing an easy scale to the large number of unqualified teachers. Read more about the Early Learning Kiosk here.
The main impact goals are:
Establishment of a monitoring system for child development in pre-school age
Increase in the number of children participating in organized learning at least one year before moving on to grade 1
Increase in the number of children of Class 1 entry age who are on course for development.
The resource mobilisation capacities of 50 civic and 50 traditional leaders in community is strengthened in order to maintain the improved quality of teaching and infrastructure development at targeted schools
Decrease of repetitions and drop-outs in classes 1 and 2
