THE Connect podcast: building peace through early childhood education
Research from Queen's University Belfast shows that evidence-based early-years programmes can rebuild trust and social cohesion in conflict-affected societies
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Early-childhood peacebuilding programmes can have a lasting impact on children well into adulthood, but they must be high-quality interventions, according to Laura Dunne, a reader at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen's University Belfast.
“We can impact children’s school readiness, their academic achievement, their social and emotional development,” Dunne said during an episode of the THE Connect podcast. The early-years stage is also an opportunity to engage with the wider community and network and build social cohesion. “But the programme has got to be evidence-based and high-quality.”
When countries have been affected by conflict, societal connections can collapse, Dunne said. “On a horizontal level, relationships between neighbours can break down quite badly, while, vertically, trust in government and high-up structures can become badly damaged as well.” Social cohesion is the glue that holds societies together, and early-years settings offer an opportunity for education but also community building.
Dunne is part of the LINKS project, a global network of early years researchers and practitioners. Its members work with teams in low and middle-income countries affected by conflict, and aim to evaluate the impact of early-years programmes. LINKS is led by Ulster University and Queen’s University Belfast, and funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health Research and supported by UNICEF.
The LINKS project is currently evaluating programmes in several countries, namely Timor-Leste, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Mali and Egypt. It recently added Colombia and Palestine. The project connects researchers in these locations, ensuring that they have culturally appropriate training. “Not only have we got people who are experts in their own countries, children, structures, and governments, when their piece of the project ends the network persists,” Dunne said.
The project also has several academic partner institutions, each bringing a wealth of expertise, she said. For example, Yale University has the Child Study Center with a specialisation in fatherhood; Harvard University runs the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and has extensive expertise in social cohesion; and New York University has the Global TIES for Children research centre. “We’re all learning from each other and about each other’s contexts,” Dunne said.
The LINKS project has refined a logic model, which connects an intervention to its outcome. “It depicts the story of how we think early childhood development programmes work in order to bring about social cohesion or peacebuilding,” Dunne said. When applied to different settings, this model indicates “what ingredients we need to make [programmes] useful, workable and feasible in each of their settings”. Other researchers and organisations can now apply this model to their own settings.
Data and research about the success of early-years interventions are vital to encouraging investment in these crucial programmes, Dunne said.
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative hosts the KoBoToolbox, and once anonymised, researchers from all over the world deposit their data into the toolbox, Dunne said. “That is then accessible to researchers all over the world who are interested in similar things.” It is a “wonderful payforward”, she said.