A community-designed play intervention to enhance early child development in rural Zimbabwe

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Two-thirds of children in sub-Saharan Africa do not reach their full cognitive potential. A network of underlying factors rooted in poverty and vulnerability lead to suboptimal early childhood development, which traps entire populations into reduced human capital, with impacts across the lifespan and into the next generation. Although there are many structural barriers to poverty alleviation, transforming the immediate environment in which a child grows up could fundamentally shape their development by providing the resources and skills to embed play, early learning and responsive caregiving into households. A multidisciplinary UK-Zimbabwe consortium with expertise in child health, developmental psychology, childhood cultures, social science, and community engagement, in partnership with a children's museum in Harare, will co-design a package of play, early learning and responsive caregiving with a rural Zimbabwean community to promote child development. This will combine multi-sensory stimulation, hands-on play and early learning opportunities through song, storytelling, and community-made toys. Community health workers will deliver individual sessions of play with households, based on the principles of the nurturing care framework, and developed through a co-design workshop with community members. The Discovereum children's museum will leverage their expertise in play, education and user-centred design to develop travelling children's museums, which will be designed and equipped by the community, and reach even the furthest rural households to provide an inclusive early-learning experience. After co-production, we will test the intervention among 24 households in Shurugwi district over a 12-week period. We will use mixed methods to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and uptake of the intervention, to evaluate mechanisms and outcomes against the co-produced theory of change, and to explore unintended consequences. We will then refine the package through another co-design workshop with community health workers and families involved in the intervention. We will then enrol a further 24 households to receive the refined intervention, and again evaluate feasibility, acceptability, uptake, and mechanism of action by week 12. We will hold one final workshop at the end of the project, to finalise the intervention, tools and training materials, and incorporate policymaker discussions to consider scalability and sustainability.A low-cost, contextually relevant intervention, delivered through community cadres during the early years could benefit the two-thirds of disadvantaged children who currently fail to reach their full potential. Even small gains in early child development would translate to significant population-level improvements in human capital, which would enhance lifelong health, wellbeing and economic prosperity.