APPROACH:
Right To Play (RTP) promotes quality education for marginalized populations through expert program design and delivery, while Polycom is a global leader in leveraging technology to fuse global collaboration. By partnering, the organizations will encourage innovative solutions to complex problems and ensure sustainability in the targeted communities. Specifically, this commitment will improve the quality of education and build life-skills and leadership capabilities for over 150,000 children and youth across West Africa through the power of sport and play.
RTP's programs provide safe spaces and opportunities for children and youth to play, learn, lead, and acquire skills and behavioral traits conducive to positive development. Through the use of Polycom's innovative video collaboration technology, RTP will train more local teachers, coaches and community leaders and reach more children across West Africa.
To achieve these objectives, RTP will call upon and conduct trainings in the following innovative education resources:
'Red Ball Child Play' is RTP's flagship resource. The program contains over 130 sports and play activities for children ages 6-12 and applies both participatory development and experiential learning approaches.
'Early Child Play', developed by early child education experts, contains over 70 games for children ages 1-6, to encourage the healthy physical, cognitive, social and emotional development of young children.
'Youth As Leader' is an innovative training program for youth ages 13-19 that is designed to stimulate leadership, efficacy, and confidence during adolescence.
Targeted programming at each stage of development will support the holistic and healthy development of children and youth and help them to navigate pivotal stages of their development. To ensure sustainability and respond to a growing demand for this programming, RTP will work with national Ministries of Education and local school authorities to integrate sport and play curricula in local school settings.
ACTION PLAN:
The Commitment will roll out in two distinctive phases.
In Phase 1, which will take place between September 2012 and September 2013, the focus will be on partnerships, capacity building and systems. During this phase, Right To Play (RTP) will provide core trainings and follow-up support to coaches, teachers, staff and partners in RTP modules. RTP will also support the rehabilitation of play spaces and classrooms to ensure safe play and learning environments. Furthermore, RTP will assist with staff capacity building and will put in place systems and technology in regional and country offices and headquarters.
Phase 2 will take place between September 2013 and September 2015 and will focus on the implementation and roll out of all programming. Throughout this time period, RTP will support regular participation of children and youth in RTP activities; hold sport and play for development play days and sport tournaments; support youth leader forums and their youth driven initiatives; and scale up and institutionalize Polycom voice and video technology for cross-organizational idea sharing and teacher, coach and staff training. Furthermore, RTP will increase its support for collaboration and advocacy that highlights the value of integrating sport and play-based learning into educational curricula.
Monitoring and evaluation will be ongoing throughout the commitment and a cumulative review will take place in the final stages of the commitment.
In the developing world, young people make up the largest segment of the population - with numbers expected to peak in the next 5 years. As the largest cohort in history, today's children and youth present an unprecedented opportunity for global development.
Leaders worldwide are beginning to realize that achieving global education goals, such as Millennium Development Goal 2 - Universal Primary Education, requires not only full enrollment, but also ensuring that children and youth have access to quality educational experiences. Children are starting primary school in greater numbers than ever before, but dropout rates are significant and lead to low levels of primary school completion in many countries.
Because children and youth in the developing world face compounded barriers, specialized interventions aimed at the healthy advancement of children and youth are needed. In addition to quality education, promoting the role of youth in the community and channeling their energy, initiatives and resources towards tackling developmental challenges is central to progress. Moving forward, it will be crucial to not only promote job opportunities for young people, but to also develop a full package of opportunities that will provide them with a genuine stake in society.
Concurrently, more efficient interventions are needed to address some of these issues. Success in this regard will depend on largely on the ability to break down barriers of distance and time and connect experts where they're needed most in the most resource effective way.
RTP is interested in partners who can commit resources and invest in long-term solutions to support this program. With the aim of building on the momentum and learning generated from programming in WAFA, RTP is looking for partners in civil society, governments, and academia to help scale this program. More specifically, RTP is interested in partnering with thought leaders on play based learning approaches for enhancing education quality who wish to promote this methodology in global development dialogues.
