ICDP trainers, Neema Pant and Manish Prasad are in charge of ICDP developments in the Palanhar Plus programme run by Save the Children India in Dungarpur, Rajasthan. The update below is based on their report received in March 2021:
Implementation of ICDP
During the 2020 lockdown, the team made use of the available time to strengthen the ICDP sessions through conferences and skype calls and this exercise proved to be very useful for the participants. The original plan for ICDP developments in 2020 was to reach 200 caregivers and 100 children aged between 7-13 years. It was envisaged to train frontline workers (SATHIN) as ICDP facilitators, in 10 Panchayats of the Jothri Block in the Dungarpur district and 10 Panchayats of the Kherwara block in the Udaipur district. This was agreed by the local government and a letter of approval was received from the DWCD department in Dungarpur to involve 10 of their SATHINs in the ICDP training and implementation. However, due to the pandemic the planned activity had to be put on hold and as an interim arrangement, it was decided that the ICDP facilitators from Save the Children will conduct the training of 128 caregivers, whereas the capacity building in ICDP of the SATHIN front line workers would be resumed once the situation caused by COVID-19 was normalized.
Identification and formation of caregivers and children groups in the Palanhar plus programme was accomplished as soon as the government restrictions on moving had stopped. Groups were formed in line with the government guideline on COVID, such as keeping the size of the groups small (4-5 persons in a group) so that proper social distancing could be maintained during the sessions. Proximity of Palanhar family to each other was also kept as an important indicator for group formations, to enable families to attend the ICDP sessions without having to move very far. A total of 32 groups of caregivers and 32 groups of children were formed in 16 panchayats. In every panchayat, there are 2 groups of caregivers and 2 groups of children.
The roll out of the ICDP programme to 128 caregivers (divided into 32 groups) started in January 2021 and it is continuing. The sessions are delivered on weekly basis and there are 3 home visits to each family (one after each of the 3 ICDP dialogues has been discussed with participant families).
Monitoring: Three tools were developed to support facilitators and trainers in monitoring of the ICDP programme and of the quality of facilitation during ICDP sessions: facilitator’s diary, ICDP home visit guide and monitoring format for trainers to observe facilitators during their work with parents.
Evaluation: Quantitative pre-assessment with a sample of 128 caregivers and 177 children in the intervention area and with the same sample in control area was carried out in year 2020 with the help of external consultant from Save the Children, US. The assessment was carried out with the help of a globally validated tool viz, caregiver survey with the caregivers and International social and emotional learning assessment (ISELA) tool with children. Apart from quantitative pre-assessment, qualitative pre-assessment was done with the sample of 20 caregivers and 20 children. The tools used for the qualitative assessment were: 1) Three minutes’ speech sample(TMSS) analyzed on 5-point Likert scale and 2) Observation of a parent-child activity analyzed using the PICCOLO scale (Parenting Interaction with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes).