There are numerous challenges facing young children in Haiti, including political upheaval, gang violence, civil unrest, shortages of necessities, and natural disasters. This fragility has had a detrimental impact on the learning and development of young children. To address these multifaceted risk factors, Dr D’Sa and his team focused on leveraging the assets of the primary settings—lakay, lekol, legliz (home, school, and church)—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, Dr D’Sa will share lessons from four years of research with communities in Haiti. He will summarise how they worked with community partners to activate the L3 system, the evidence and impact of this activation, and lessons for similar initiatives in other contexts around the world.
About Dr Nikhit D’Sa
Dr Nikhit D’Sa is a developmental psychologist and applied education researcher. He studies how children learn and develop when faced with acute and chronic risk factors in humanitarian contexts. In collaboration with Ministries of Education, multilateral donors, foundations, non-governmental organizations, higher-education institutions, faith-based communities, and schools, Dr. D’Sa has worked to identify modifiable patterns and routines within relationships and settings that can be directly targeted through practitioner-led interventions.
Dr. D’Sa has also pioneered innovative approaches to incorporating the perspective of children, parents, and teachers into context-relevant assessments of children’s social-emotional development and teachers’ well-being.