Leveraging Faith-Based Communities to Support Children's Development in Failed States: Lessons from Haiti

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Nikhit D'Sa
Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor and Director of Research, Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child

There are numerous challenges facing young children in Haiti, including political upheaval, gang violence, civil unrest, community violence, closures, shortages of necessities, and natural disasters. This fragility has had a detrimental impact on their learning and development. To address these multifaceted risk factors D'Sa's team at the University of Notre Dame focused on leveraging the assets of the primary settings – lakay, lekol, legliz (home, school, and parish) – where young children learn and develop daily. Over four years and spread across six of the 10 departments in Haiti, they worked to activate this lakay-lekol-legliz (L3) system through interventions and approaches that were need-based, developed in partnership with communities, iteratively tested and improved, and gradually scaled. In this talk, D'Sa will share lessons from these years of research with faith-based communities, discussing how his team at the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child worked with community partners to activate the L3 system, the evidence and impact of this activation, and lessons for similar initiatives in other conflict-affected and fragile states.