Seibo operate in 37 x nursery schools & 12 x primary schools where a hot meal is provided to 1,534 children under-5 & 12,887 students attending primary school. Of the 37 x nurseries, 13 are Community Based Care Centres. These CBCC’s have a total enrolment of 508 young children. What follows is a report on ongoing training for the caregivers at the CBCC’s in our community!

The CBCC Challenge
CBCC’s – often referred to as Community Based Children’s or Community Based Care Centres often struggle to function as a place of education. Most of the caregivers are volunteers chosen from their respective communities with little experience of how to teach the under-5’s. In partnership with the Mother Teresa Children’s Centre a tailor-made training course was provided in early April 2018 taking into consideration the needs of the trainers. All learning materials were administered in Chichewa to help caregivers understand better the concepts & to develop skills suited to teaching the Under-5’s.

CBCC- ECD Training
Prior to beginning each of the 21 participants were asked to sign a Memorandum of Understanding highlighting the caregiver’s responsibilities along with Seibo’s expectations from the training. These expectations were also communicated in advance to the caregivers, the village heads and the relevant people in each community. A summary of the MoU follows;
Caregivers
Each and every caregiver that has received the training is asked to work at the school for not less than 2 years upon completion of the training. Upon receiving the training the caregivers have been given authority to be pioneers and train fellow caregivers in their communities
Village Heads & Community
In its work Seibo encourages volunteerism and community ownership of a programme. Therefore, it urged the community to provide support to the caregivers as they carry their work. And Seibo made it clear that it will not give any financial support to the caregivers during their work so the community has to provide full support to the caregivers.

About the CBCC Training
The training to be held over 2 x months is conducted on Wednesdays & Thursdays from 8:30am-14:00pm. Caregivers are provided with breakfast in the morning (rice porridge) & nisim for lunch with each of the caregivers contributing flour for making the nsima.
So far 3 sub topics of child development have been covered.
-Introduction to Early Childhood Development,
-Social and Emotional Development
-Physical development.

Training Challenges
While valuable skills have already been imparted to the participating caregivers we envisage many challenges such as:

-Despite previous communications to the contrary there was an expecation among some caregivers that they would receive money for the duration of the training. As participation was totally voluntary & training provided for free it was made clear that no financial support was available.

-Despite the training being conducted 2 days per week some participants are still only managing to attend once a week. The caregivers have been reminded that as an exam is administered at the end of training, certificates will only be awarded to those who attain a pass mark or higher.

The Cost So Far

From an overall budget of MK 610,080 (received as a donation made direct to Seibo Malawi) the sum of MK 284, 450.94 has been spent as follows;
Teaching and Learning materials = MK96,365
Meals = MK 92, 085
Alllowances for MTCC Trainers & Village Cooks (15 days) – MK 79,000
Fuel for Transport- MK 17,000
Balance Remaining: MK 325,629.06
The training is scheduled the end on the 5th of July 2018.

A further report will follow.