ARNEC, UBS Optimus Foundation launch responsive caregiving project with country-level support in Indonesia, Philippines

Investing in responsive caregiving and parenting practices is crucial for promoting healthy Early Childhood Development (ECD). Ensuring positive and playful parenting practices during the early years supports the holistic development of young children contributing significantly to children's cognitive, social and emotional development. Responsive relationships of children with adults promote healthy brain development and provide buffering protection needed to manage toxic stress.

For adults, healthy relationships boost well-being by providing practical advice and emotional support. Responsive parenting helps in building a foundation for resilience across childhood and adulthood as it has been observed that the most common protective factor for children and teens who develop resilience is having at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult.

The foregoing premises motivated ARNEC to develop a proposal entitled ‘Mainstreaming Opportunities for enhancing Responsive Caregiving for young children’ or MORECare4YoungChildren in Indonesia and the Philippines and submit the same to UBS Optimus Foundation (UBS OF) last year.

In May 2024 at the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on ECD in Penang, Malaysia, the UBS OF-assisted MORECare4YoungChildren Project was launched in collaboration with ARNEC as lead coordinating organisation and the HI ECD Coalition Indonesia and ECCD Council of the Philippines as country-level partners.

Fang Hui represented UBS OF during the project launch with the ARNEC Board of Directors, Steering Committee, Institutional Members, National ECD Networks, and National Representatives in attendance. Evelyn Santiago, Mega Indrawati, and Balagtas Himigbayan Santiago represented ARNEC, HI ECD Coalition Indonesia, and ECCD Council of the Philippines, respectively.

MORECare4YoungChildren aims to support evidence-based system-level change in support of responsive caregiving and parenting in Indonesia and the Philippines.

In Indonesia, the Holistic Integrative ECD (HI-ECD) Coalition will work with communities to implement a parenting education program that promotes male engagement and playful parenting practices.  Developing community-level models and approaches is an opportunity to influence gender-responsive and playful parenting programs at the country level, through the Family Planning Board of Indonesia.

In the Philippines, the ECCD Council will work with two local government units in implementing its responsive caregiving/parenting program that promotes infant and toddler early development (ITED) to develop a service delivery model to improve institutionalisation at the local level, including policy and budget support for center-based child development services and the capacity building of the workforce.

Both models will focus on evidence-based behavioral change approaches to support improving and scaling up existing responsive caregiving and parenting programs in Indonesia and the Philippines and how the gains and lessons of implementation will inform ARNEC’s advocacy for and cross-country knowledge sharing on fit-for-context system-level change in other jurisdictions in the region.

The project will run for 18 months informed by baseline studies in both countries and an evaluation of results vis-à-vis the objectives of the MORECare4YoungChildren by the last quarter of 2025.

The HI ECD Coalition Indonesia and ECCD Council of the Philippines are both national ECD networks and also Institutional Members of ARNEC.