Author: Nicoletta Armstrong

Save the Children Nepal (SC) adapted the ICDP programme in order to deliver it to parents and caregivers of their Child Grant package, aiming to improve parenting behaviour for the wellbeing of the targeted children. SC first implemented ICDP in 2018, in a pilot project which brought encouraging evidence. Since then, the ICDP programme has been expanding through SC collaboration with local governments. SC  focuses on evidence generation to influence the government of Nepal.

In 2020, due to difficulties caused by COVID-19, SC adopted different methods to continue with the roll out of the ICDP programme. They conducted ICDP Facilitator’s training through Zoom meeting, used the radio to broadcast ICDP messages and organized meetings of caregivers in person but with smaller numbers of participants and with appropriate safety measures in place.

SC implemented ICDP in 3 municipalities by mobilizing 40 facilitators who reached 893 parents, including 66 fathers. In addition, the facilitators undertook 72 home visits to support ICDP parenting practices at home. The follow up meetings with parents allowed facilitators to strengthen the ICDP skills and knowledge that parents had acquired and to empower them to raise this agenda with their local governments.  A total of 284 parents were visited during the follow up.

Realizing that trained mothers needed support from others such as fathers, in-laws and other neighbours to better apply their ICDP skills and knowledge with their children, SC started to organize separate meetings with fathers, as well as providing ICDP sensitization to different communities. There were 13 community events during which ICDP sensitization was given to family members, neighbours, local teachers, child protection committee members and children at child club members. This orientation programme played an important role in enhancing the level of understanding of parent-child relationship, of the effect of malnutrition and neglect on a child. A total of 331 people participated in this programme.

ICDP with fathers

A qualitative research study of ICDP conducted in 2018, recommended father’s involvement in a especially adapted ICDP package. The ICDP team at SC has since then developed a compressed ICDP agenda in order to conduct meetings with fathers. A total of 66 fathers received ICDP training.

ICDP radio drama

During 2020, SC aired a short radio drama on the ICDP parenting programme named “Yo awasar pani ho” (“This is an opportunity too”). It was broadcast through local FM stations in SC’s project area, namely in the Jajarkot, Kalikot, Mahottari, Dolakha and Kavre districts. The main objective of this radio programme was to raise parents’ awareness about using the lockdown period as an opportunity for spending quality time with their children. The drama was based on the ICDP guidelines. The radio programme benefitted a population of about 35,600.

The photo above shows an ICDP meeting with parents in Zissegre, a village in the commune of Dargo in the Province of Namentenga, North Central Region of Burkina Faso.

“The school principal in this village acknowledged that students whose parents follow the parenting skills programme have very good results in class. They are actively involved in their class activities and have good grades.”

– says Lea Aubin Sanou, ICDP trainer at Save the Children Burkina Faso.

Aubin has trained the ICDP facilitators who have been working with these parents. He is currently in the field offering supervision and support to different groups of facilitators and parents.

Alimata Sidibe, is the other ICDP trainer at Save the Children and she cooperates closely with Aubin – together they are spreading the ICDP programme to different parts of the country. They are forming and supporting several teams of facilitators linked to Save the Children projects. Save the Children adopted the ICDP programme and adapted it to the cultural context of the country.

Alimata commented:  “This is a nice testimony from the school principal – what a comfort to know that the programme is helping to save lives.“

Swedish ICDP trainer, Monica Andersson works at the Social Welfare office, located in the Tierp village 130 km north of Stockholm, where she included the ICDP programme as part of her work.

In 2020 she started to conduct ICDP training of a group of ten colleagues. She explains:

This group is smaller than the previous one, consisting of ten persons but the training proved to be a nice and meaningful process. We had to postpone the work due to COVID 19 in the spring, but we managed to continue in the autumn.

The above photo shows the small group on the fourth and last day of the training, when we had to use digital contact – which was somewhat of a challenge for me. However, everything went fine.

The participants of this training included some of the colleagues from the social welfare area where I work and in addition, there were two students. Represented areas are the department for investigation and emergency, department of foster care and department for family therapy.

I hope we will be able to make the programme grow in our community, that ICDP become well established knowledge in our community.

Report from psychologist Andrea Carolina Flórez:

The Psychology programme of the Mariana University in Pasto, in the department of Nariño, through the course of psychological intervention in educational contexts, carried out the implementation of the ICDP programme “I am a person”, during the period from August to November 2020.

The process was guided by the director of the ICDP Colombia Foundation, Carmen Lucia Andrade and it was led by Andrea Carolina Flórez, university teacher and coordinator of the area called Teaching-Learning Processes.

The ICDP programme was implemented virtually, and had the participation of 16 families consisting of male and female caregivers, aged between 26 and 55 years old.

The methodology was developed through weekly meetings consisting of reflections, workshops, exercises and conversations that in a didactic way tried to strengthen affective communication and sensitive care that substantially improves the relationships between children and their caregivers.

One of the main challenges of this implementation was the mental and emotional state of the families in times of the COVID 19 pandemic. Some caregivers declared to be stressed, worried, anxious, overloaded during this time of health, social and economic emergency.

For the team of practicing psychologists, this challenge was an opportunity to put their technological, human and disciplinary skills at the service of families, helping to transform a crisis scenario into an opportunity for caregivers to discover and re-signify their own care practices.

For this reason, the words that summarize this experience is Learning and Solidarity.

ICDP has been growing steadily year after year in Denmark with thousands of teachers, pedagogues, psychologists and other professionals receiving training in the programme.

Anne Linder has written a report of the activities by the Danish Centre for ICDP, which makes for an interesting and inspiring read. Click here to read her report.

Taken from the report:

ICDP and the paradox of the pedagogical work

ICDP – trainee Oliver Nani, also a student of psychology, has a philosophic approach to life in general, and he writes; “I have certified roughly 100 pedagogues, teachers and school leaders at ICDP level 1 this year. Furthermore, I have been engaged in the study of paradox and complexity in pedagogics. I find that a specific way in which ICDP excels, is in its encompassment of the paradoxes of pedagogical work, as exemplified in the collision of the guidelines 2 vs 8; who is supposed to “change course” – the child or the caregiver? ICDP says both, and thus gives way for working with the paradox in a sensitizing way – which is surprisingly uncommon in caregiving programs. Another paradox is encompassed in that ICDP is a proclaimed sensitizing program, which roughly translates into that the caregiver is supposed to produce new solutions herself – bottom up. Yet ICDP obviously presents a framework and guidelines for these solutions – top down. Once again, the balancing of the paradox becomes possible, because neither of the positions are completely trumping the other, but makes way for an ongoing contextualized balancing act”. Oliver will work with that paradox in his thesis at the University during 2021.

Final comments on the Annual Report

It has been a strange year. But still, we have worked on many projectors and still have many new ideas on how to disseminate and quality-assure ICDP.

ICDP is becoming more and more widespread in the educational sector and we are inventive and committed to finding solutions to the challenges we face. We are growing steadily year by year – but we are very careful to maintain our sensitivity and curiosity about other people. The world is diverse, and we are only a small part of the truth about the good life.

A Happy New Year.

On behalf of the Danish Center for ICDP,

Anne Linder

ICDP has an agreement for cooperation with the non-profit organization Ububele (https://ububele.org/about-us/), with the aim of integrating ICDP as one of their activities to strengthen child and family mental health in the township of Alexandra. 

The ICDP developments and training that have taken place in Johannesburg are explained by Silje Holter, voluntary trainer:

At the start of 2020, we carried out the first round of workshops for new facilitators over a period of two weeks.  Facilitators were divided into pairs and each pair made plans for their practical work with groups of caregivers (their self-training projects).

Before the lockdown I managed to hold one support meeting during which some of the trainee facilitators presented the way they were implementing the ICDP programme with caregivers. We looked at the ICDP material brought to the meeting by some of the facilitators. Then I was forced to leave South Africa due to corona virus related circumstances.

During the period between April and August, South Africa was for the most part in lockdown, so it was not possible for facilitators to run ICDP caregiver groups. However, the country has been slowly reopening since then, and this meant that more self-training projects could be organized and carried out by facilitators. Some facilitators had a long break before re-starting.

During early December, we got together again, but this time the support meeting which lasted one full day, had to be held online. All trainee facilitators that participated in my workshops during January and February were present for the online meeting too. They talked about their self-assessments, their practical experiences, including some of their frustrations. They also had questions which we all discussed together. Due to problems with transportation, technical difficulties and other problems only some but not all participants managed to share their video material from their meetings with caregivers.

We made plans to hold our last support meeting in January 2021 – it will take a full day online. Each pair of trainee facilitators will then provide a logbook from their self-training projects for my approval. Hopefully some more videos will be available by then. The emphasis will be on planning the future work, including planning ahead how to adapt the ICDP material to the South African context.

The leadership of the Ububele organisation hopes that Ubulele may one day become a training site for new ICDP facilitators. In view of this, they are trying to provide as many opportunities as possible for the current facilitators to practice applying the ICDP programme – and not only by working in pairs but also each facilitator running a caregiver group alone. This will create solid ground for trainer level work later on.

Rita Crecelius, ICDP trainer and contact person for ICDP Germany reports:

Ana Vázquez-Zimmermann is a day care leader at Hildesheim-Drispenstedt. As soon as finished her ICDP caregiver level training with me in February 2020, she was eager to bring this marvellous tool to her big team of more than 20 colleagues, who are caring for a total of 88 children.

At first, the Corona virus  rules seemed to make this an impossible mission. But Ana didn’t give up. Due to the minimum distance rule, she had to find a particularly large room for the training, otherwise, the group would not have been allowed to meet.

And Ana found this room! On the 2^nd of November a group of 16 colleagues from Ana’s day care (others were sick) came together, and were able to sit down together at the correct distance. It was the kick off of their caregiver level training in the ICDP programme. Fifteen women and a man showed to be curious about this mysterious ICDP. What is it? Why is Ana so enthusiastic about it? Why should we do it?

Together, we did some exercises to study the importance of empathy, we watched videos, we were looking at the brain structure and we had discussions about sometimes difficult child behaviours. After lunch, we even did a dance in the church to wake up our body and our mind for the afternoon session.

At the end of the day, all of the colleagues expressed surprise at how fast the time had passed that day. They were eager to try out their new perspective and their new relational knowledge with their day care children. All found the day to be very helpful for their daily practical work  with children.
Ana was satisfied as it was exactly what she had wanted!

Thanks to this courageous and determined woman, we held an ICDP session in person in the midst of Covid-19 restrictions: Thank God, she found the Church! And we will go on with the Training in January 2021.

I am looking forward to it!

ICDP trainer, Luis Fernando Lopez shares evidence of virtual interventions that have been undertaken in recent months in the department of Boyacá, Colombia.  

“We have been organizing virtual training with professionals from a number of different institutions: the Juan de Castellanos University, the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, the Zona F Foundation, the CENIX Institute.

The purpose of this activity was to enable professionals to apply the programme by working with parents, technical caregivers of early childhood care and the community in general of the department of Boyacá.

The ICDP Colombia leader, Carmen Lucia Andrade, was able to participate in the first meeting with mental health and early childhood professionals. We discussed strategies in times of pandemic and its consequences today and in the future.”

On the 30^th of November Alimata Sidibe and Aubin Sanou received their ICDP Trainer level diplomas through an online meeting with their trainer Nicoletta Armstrong.

Background:

In January 2020, ICDP started to cooperate with Save the Children (SC) in connection with their Child Sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) project in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The ICDP programme was integrated in this project with the aim of strengthening parental competences and children’s overall psychosocial development.

During 2020 a group of 22 professionals linked to SC and their partner organizations, attended ICDP Facilitator level training in person and online, and after completing the whole process of training they received their ICDP certificates by the summer 2020. During the autumn, they continued to apply ICDP with families in their respective communities.

At the same time, two previously trained facilitators, Alimata Sidibe and Aubin Sanou, started they process to become trainers. As a requirement for certification as trainers, they trained two groups of new facilitators. In the face of many difficulties and interruptions due to Covid-19, they still managed to organize and carry out workshops for 20 facilitators and to oversee their application of the ICDP programme with families in different parts of the country. They offered support and advice to trainee facilitators through visits in person whenever possible, but also by phone and online contact. After completing the written work at the end of November, Aubin and Alimata were ready to receive their diplomas as trainers. As a result, there are now over forty facilitators and two trainers in Burkina Faso. The adapted ICDP materials were tested out in the field and will be published in 2021.

“We had received many positive comments from parents who attended the ICDP course, but the following comment from one parent seems particularly significant: The cash transfer has been very useful to our lives, but for me this learning about good parenting is even more important.” – Aubin, ICDP trainer.

Photo above: a group of women receiving ICDP in the village of Kossouka