SUMMARY

Quality interactions with caregivers, such as those enabled by early learning games, can provide children with opportunities to develop important physical, social, and emotional skills. With support from The Agency Fund, we worked with The Reach Trust, an organization that developed a learning game called Finding Thabo, to design and test behaviorally informed ways to encourage caregivers to play with the game more often. We found that low-cost, light-touch behavioral interventions supported caregivers to play Finding Thabo with their children significantly more often.

The Challenge

Caregiver engagement in learning and play is essential for young children’s development. However, in South Africa, studies consistently show low rates of caregiver engagement with children. For example, in 2018, approximately 41% of children in South Africa were never read to or told stories, and 37% never engaged in drawing or coloring with someone in their household. Finding Thabo is an interactive play-based game that uses localized pictures to help children develop key skills like counting and visual processing. It is accompanied by a WhatsApp or Facebook chatbot that guides teachers and caregivers to play with children. Finding Thabo has been rolled out to early childhood development centers and homes across South Africa. However, behavioral barriers that prevent caregivers from playing with their children persist, even when caregivers may be highly motivated to do so.

Our Approach

In partnership with The Reach Trust, we worked to understand and contextualize the specific barriers caregivers face to playing Finding Thabo. Through interactive workshops and in consultations with caregivers and teachers, we designed and tested three solutions to address the behavioral barriers and support caregivers to play with Finding Thabo. These included:

• Updates to the Finding Thabo pictures that include a simple and visual instruction panel. This helped caregivers understand how to play the game and build confidence in playing and teaching their children.
• An animated explainer video that highlights caregivers’ role in child development and addresses misperceptions about how young children learn, particularly since caregivers don’t equate play with brain development. Both solutions mentioned above are available in three local languages and a visual format, making the information more accessible.
• An updated teacher orientation that emphasizes the shared role of caregivers and teachers in child development. It also reduces teachers’ hesitancy to distribute Finding Thabo to caregivers by addressing their concerns about caregivers’ ability to play.

We implemented the three solutions in the Western Cape, South Africa in early 2024 and evaluated their impact on caregiver behavior through a cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT).

Results

Results from our evaluation show that, compared to caregivers who received the original Finding Thabo materials, those who received the behavioral interventions were, on average, 13.4 percentage points more likely to play Finding Thabo with their children four or more times per week. The interventions also increased caregivers’ confidence to engage in learning activities with their children (by 2.4 percentage points), and increased caregivers’ understanding that learning can happen outside of early childhood development centers (by 6.9 percentage points).

Our evaluation also illuminated that the main driver of these positive outcomes was the updated Finding Thabo picture, demonstrating how light-touch, low-cost changes to interventions can have large impact. More details on our results can be found here.

Takeaway

Our results demonstrate the clear potential for behavioral-science based solutions to increase caregiver engagement in play with their young children, which is essential for children’s development. By addressing the behavioral barriers that inhibit play, practitioners and program designers can help reset persistent misperceptions about learning and play and build caregivers’ confidence to engage with their children.

Interested in our work applying behavioral science to global development? Email info@ideas42.org and follow us on LinkedIn to join the conversation.