EARLY CHILD CARE AND DEVELOPMENT (CARENIDHI SAMUDAYIK BAL VIKAS KENDRA). CARENIDHI Community Initiatives for Family Centric Services in Early Child Care and Development of Children with Special Needs in Resource-poor Community Settings

Children dealing with the double whammy of disability and poverty lack the opportunities to maximize their development potential. Community-based rehabilitation with a focus on early childhood care and health promotion for the well-being and development of these children are important pre-requisites to improve the quality of life and foundational competencies of these children.

Grassroots organizations working with limited resources find it a constant challenge to sustain the recurring expenses in a programmatic mode especially when seeking to widen the scope to cover more beneficiaries or work for further advancement with a life-course approach.  

In order to promote early child care and development, we need to work with families and the immediate caring environment of these children. We also propose to build on the family involvement and community support to widen the scope of the work with early intervention (for 0-6-year-old children).

Our work would, therefore, encompass home management/family-based program, caregiver capacity building, pre-school competencies for learning by the children, school support and community mobilization to facilitate work in both micro and macro systems influencing child development (ecological model).  Working with a multi-pronged approach which includes a cascade model of training the caregivers is an important aspect of the work (please see https://youtu.be/Qgl2ZXb8-5A ).

We hope to play a promotional role in community-based inclusive development through our training and programmes for caregiving. The trans-disciplinary learning of front-line workers in our program to integrate disability-related health and education initiatives into community development should lay the foundation for enduring community-based work for children with special needs.

Early intervention is not just for the child but also for the adult that one is to become. We believe that early childhood care gives the best start in life for sustainable development.

With the improvement in neural, behavioral, interpersonal and societal levels, the growing children will be able to cope with the multi-faceted challenges of developmental disabilities. Good health, parenting help and creating community supports for caregiving and building abilities to lay the foundations for good education will make a difference. The impact should be seen in qualitative improvements as well as reaching out to more families to help the children dream big for a bright future.

Evidence from Neurosciences is strong that the best investment one can do is to promote child development in the early years when the brain is developing. Hence, your donation to this cause will have the greatest impact.