PATH and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation partner to promote child development services in facilities and communities

Since 2012, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has generously funded PATH to design, test, refine, and scale-up approaches to promoting child development through facility- and community-based health services. Starting with a small-scale pilot that tested the basic Care for Child Development package with a modest sample of service providers in one district of Maputo Province in Mozambique, multiple rounds of iterative piloting and scale-up have resulted in every health facility and every community health worker in Kenya’s Siaya County and Mozambique’s Maputo Province offering child development monitoring and counseling as an integral component of primary healthcare (PHC). This systems-based approach to promoting early childhood development (ECD) through PHC is now enshrined in the global Nurturing Care Framework.

The Hilton Foundation’s recent investments have allowed PATH to test and gather lessons from several promising innovations targeting vulnerable groups—e.g., group-based parenting and mental wellbeing support for adolescent girls and young women that are mothers in Kenya, integrating maternal mental health screening and counseling into PHC in Mozambique, and enhancing community-based rehabilitation of young children with caregiver peer support and strengthened referrals in Mozambique.

A wealth of global goods—training curricula and information, education, and communication materials—developed with the Hilton Foundation’s investments in PATH have been adapted for use in other settings. For example, adaptations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia are now enabling universal provision of child development monitoring and counseling through PHC; while technical assistance has allowed partners in other parts of Ethiopia (including conflict-affected regions), Côte d'Ivoire, Malawi, Tanzania, Turkey, and Ukraine to introduce ECD and mental health services into existing nutrition, HIV, tuberculosis, and parenting programs.

Starting November 2023, PATH has been implementing a one-year project that will document and disseminate results and lessons learned from the Hilton Foundation’s over decade-plus investment in PATH in Kenya, Mozambique, and the wider region. In the first quarter, we have embarked on the following workstreams:

• Described how human-centered design (HCD) has been carried out to refine the use of routine health sector touchpoints—and revise associated materials—to promote ECD.
• Developed the first outline of an open-source virtual knowledge hub of implementation materials—job aids, training curricula, and mentoring tools—developed with support from the Hilton Foundation and other donors to promote ECD and mental health and wellbeing through routine health services.
• Facilitated a side-event at the International Conference on Public Health in Africa to hear government perspectives on how existing tools and platforms have been used to deliver ECD services through the health sector.

The following are some key activities that we look forward to carrying over the course of 2024:

• Advocate with government to integrate the HCD-refined solutions into health sector workstreams.
• Document results from innovative pilots promoting ECD and mental health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations.
• Finalize and launch the open-source virtual knowledge hub of implementation materials.
• Finalize handover of programming and training materials developed by PATH with funding from the Hilton Foundation to governmental and nongovernmental partners in Kenya and Mozambique.
• Conduct additional webinars and conference presentations and develop briefs and articles that summarize lessons learned and results from promoting ECD and mental health and wellbeing through the health sector.
• Provide technical guidance to governmental and nongovernmental partners interested in promoting ECD and mental health and wellbeing through the health sector.

In the words of Melanie Picolo, who leads PATH’s work in Mozambique and has been an integral part of this joint journey between the Hilton Foundation and PATH:

“This grant is the culmination of over a decade of support to the governments of Kenya and Mozambique (and other countries in the region) to provide child development–supportive interventions through the health sector. The various phases of Hilton Foundation funding have been grounded in cycles of adaptive learning and iterative quality improvement that tell us what works—and what doesn’t. This has resulted in the developed solutions being locally generated, owned, and championed. We are excited to share our learnings on how the Nurturing Care Framework can be implemented in practice with the broader health, nutrition, protection, and ECD community.”

Follow PATH and #ECDatPATH on social media for upcoming events and new resources as they become available!

For more information about this work, please write to integratedmchd@path.org.