Early Child Education

The project on Early Childhood Education in the Province of Agusan del Sur has just started early this year. This is in partnership with the Provincial Social Welfare and Development Office (PSWDO). This is a 3 year project that aims at contributing for better educational attainment of disadvantaged children. The target Municipalities are La Paz, Loreto and Veruela. Its components include Capacity Building and Training of Day Care Workers, Health and Nutrition which includes supplemental feeding, Construction or Repair of Day Care Centers, Advocacy Inter-agency Collaboration and Networking and Monitoring and Evaluation.

A Stakeholders Analysis workshop was conducted last February 15, 2007. This was attended by representatives of the Provincia Health and Social Services Office, the Provincial Planning and Development Office (PPDO), Provincial Nutrition Action Office (PNAO), Provincial Social Welfare and Development Office (PSWDO), Provincial Engineering Office (PEO) and their counterparts at the Municipal Government. The three involved SVD Parish Priests and the KKS ECE Agusan Coordinating Team. This was facilitated by Mr. Andy Pestano.

A consultation meeting with Provincial Governor and Municipal Mayors in the 3 target municipalities was conducted on March 5, 6 and 7, 2007 to discuss respective commitments before signing the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).

A Strategic Planning was conducted on February 22-23, 2007 to finalize the Operational Plan for the Year 2007 based on the Logical Framework.

The Project Coordinator participated in the Provincial Local Development Planning for Children last March 14-15, 2007 wherein gaps on Early Childhood Education were discussed and plans formulated.

Trainings for Day Care Workers on Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) Checklist and Revised Manual was conducted in three batches. March 26-30, 2007 – Veruela Day Care Workers, April 9-13 La Paz and April 16-20 Loreto. The activity was attended by 100 Day Care Workers. They were able to understand themselves better as Day Care Workers and understand better children’s development and learning. They were able to clarify how to create profile of children. The major output of the activity is that they were able to formulate activity web which they use for creating session plan for the whole year. As an impression of most of the participant " Katulo na ni namo ug training ini apan karn pa gyud mi nkasabot ug na klaro and mga kalibog sa amo hunahuna. (This is the third time that we attended training on this but only after this training that we fully understand and clarified what was not clear before. Participants were couched by PSWDO Social Workers and JPIC Traning Officer. Sessions plans were collected after the Training and certificates were distributed.