Getting to Know Your International Contacts – Part 2

The title of this blog is a bit misleading as I still have not made contact with any International Contacts much less have I been able to get to know them.

So this blog should be entitled a review of Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initative” website which can be found at http://developingchild.harvard.edu/initiatives/global_initiative/.  

The website is a part of the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child.  The Center launched the Global Children’s Initiative in an explicit effort to build an integrated international approach to child survival, health, and development in the earliest years of life.  The Initiative is also the centrepiece of Center’s global child health and development agenda.

The website showcases the following:

The Global Children's Initiative is focused on three strategic objectives:

 To reframe public discourse about the early childhood period by educating high-level decision makers about the common underlying science of learning, behaviour, and health;

 To support innovative, multidisciplinary research and demonstration projects in selected countries or regions to expand global understanding of how healthy development happens, how it can be derailed, and how to get it back on track; and

 To build leadership capacity in child development research and policy among individuals and institutions in low- and middle-income countries in order to increase the number and influence of diverse perspectives that are contributing to the global movement on behalf of young children.

Guided by these strategic objectives, the Global Children’s Initiative has begun to build a portfolio of activities in three domains: early childhood development; mental health; and children in crisis and conflict situations.  Each of these domains is being guided by a faculty working group that will facilitate continuing cross-disciplinary collaboration; design and implement new projects; and engage additional faculty, students, and collaborators beyond the Harvard community.

As part of its Global Children’s Initiative, the Center is launching its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. In collaboration with local experts, the Center aims to use the science of child health and development to guide stronger policies and larger investments to benefit young children and their families in Brazil.

The Center is collaborating with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. This project represents a unique opportunity for the Center to work with Brazilian scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders to adapt the Center’s programmatic model for the local context in order to catalyze more effective policies and programs that will, ultimately, foster a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable society.

Together, these organizations will engage in the following 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 long-time 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.

The Center's Global Children’s Initiative has begun to build a portfolio of activities in three domains:

1.     early childhood development;

2.     mental health; and

3.     children in crisis and conflict situations.

Each of these domains is being guided by a faculty working group that will facilitate continuing cross-disciplinary collaboration; design and implement new projects; and engage additional faculty, students, and collaborators beyond the Harvard community. The initial set of activities currently being developed is outlined below.

Early Childhood Development

The first priority in this area is to adapt the successful work the Center has conducted in the United States for a broader range of strategically selected audiences, in an effort to energize and reframe the global dialogue around investments in the earliest years of life. To this end, we plan to educate the leadership of key international agencies, publish and disseminate papers to establish a strong scientific framework for global work, and conduct systematic communications research to identify the most effective ways to translate the science of child development for global policymakers.

The second priority is to generate and apply new knowledge that addresses the health and developmental needs of young children in a variety of settings. Initial projects that are in various stages of planning, fundraising, and implementation include the following:

• Assessing quality in early childhood environments and programs in diverse global contexts;
• Piloting assessments to measure child development outcomes linked to malaria control strategies in Zambia;
• Expanding effective interventions to improve preschool quality in Chile.

The Center also plans to convene research forums to facilitate collaboration among a wide network of scholars globally to share findings and co-develop publications.

Child Mental Health

Mental health concerns constitute a massively under-addressed issue that has significant implications for the broader health and development of children and societies. There is an urgent need to identify the scope of the problem within and across countries and to develop evidence-based approaches in policy and service delivery that are responsive to diverse cultural contexts. 

To respond to this challenge, a working group of Harvard faculty is developing a focused agenda in research, education, and public engagement to address significant gaps in knowledge and service delivery. The following three initial projects have been selected to launch this effort, subject to sufficient funding:

• Assessing the state of child mental health services in Shanghai, China;
• Developing and evaluating family-based strategies to prevent mental health problems in children affected by HIV/AIDS in Rwanda; and
• Addressing child maltreatment and mental health outcomes in three Caribbean nations (Barbados, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname). 

To strengthen their policy relevance, each of these projects is being designed to include an economic component to analyze allocation effects in the supply and demand for services.

Children and Crisis 

The Global Children’s Initiative is currently exploring potential synergies with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, both of which have extensive experience working in emergency situations across the world. The goal of this effort is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporates a science-based, developmental perspective into the assessment and management of child well-being in a range of natural and man-made crises, focusing on both immediate circumstances and long-term adaptation. Two issues are the initial focus of activity in this domain:

• Exploring comparable approaches to surveying child status in post-earthquake Haiti and Chile.
• Bringing the science of child development into strategies for addressing acute malnutrition.

Building Broader, More Diverse Leadership Capacity in Research and Policy

Finally, and central to the Center’s core mission, an array of education and training activities will be incorporated into all of the thematic areas described above. The first dimension of this work focuses on building a sustainable infrastructure to support the productive engagement of Harvard students and faculty in a diversity of global settings. The second dimension focuses on developing opportunities to provide leadership training for individual researchers, policymakers, and institutions, primarily in the majority world.

The three new ideas or insights that I have gained about early childhood systems around the globe from reviewing this website are:

1. Instead of constantly competing against each other, nations can collaborate and share information for the progress and development of all.
2. Science and research are vital for development and advancement, but sometimes the human touch of educators coming together and discussing the practicality of certain teaching methods can be so much more effective.
3. Research and science should never replace the hands-on know-how of a teacher with experience.

Resource:

Harvard University website.  Center on the Developing Child.  Global Children’s Initiative.  Retrieved on February 4, 2012 from http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/global_initiative/