The women I’ve spoken with have been here for around a decade their children were born in Lebanon, but they aren’t permanent residents and have no path to citizenship. Seven out of 10 fled or were forced from their homes at the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. Syrians are the largest displaced population in the world. They say, ‘This is not our country - this is the country of these other children, so that’s why they are fighting us.’” The children don’t know which country they belong to - to Lebanon or to Syria. “There are children who are saying ‘Oh, you are Syrian,’ and they want to fight with them,” Sou’ad, a refugee with four children under seven who also volunteers for the IRC, told me through an interpreter in a separate interview. And their kids are sometimes bullied as well. They said they are nervous just using their UNHCR aid cards - which mark them as refugees - to buy food at the supermarket. There had been a recent security incident at their home camp, so we Zoomed from a neighboring camp.Īs the economic crisis worsens here, the mothers I spoke with reported feeling growing resentment and sometimes discrimination from their Lebanese neighbors. Hana’s four-year-old son reclined on her lap. With the right support from caregivers and communities, Murphy and her colleagues believe, more children around the world can grow up resilient amid crisis, displacement, and war.ĬOPING WITH DISCRIMINATION, CONFLICT, AND HUNGERĪt a refugee camp in the agricultural Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, Amal, Hana, and Mariam, three Syrian refugee mothers who participated in the program, sat on a carpet in a nearly empty tent, wearing headscarves and patterned robes. “We see so many children that just because of the circumstances of their birth - born into crisis, into conflict - the odds of them achieving their full potential are reduced,” says Katie Murphy, the director of early-childhood development and strategic initiatives at the IRC, who was closely involved with the project. Sesame and IRC hope that holistic intervention can help the world’s most vulnerable kids cope with toxic stress - the kind that can, if unchecked, change the architecture of a developing brain. “But nicely done - to even bring them anything in this setting is kind of amazing.” Compared with in-person preschool, “this is probably not the full nutritional value,” she cautions. “I’m pretty impressed,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, an expert in early child development at Temple University, who was not involved with the research. Children made progress in overall development, emerging literacy, emerging numeracy, motor skills, social-emotional skills, and even the quality of play - like pretending to be Ma’zooza the goat. In 2023, Hiro Yoshikawa and his team of researchers at New York University showed in a randomized controlled trial that Syrian refugee children taking part in an 11-week, fully remote learning program, combining Ahlan Simsim videos with live support from local preschool teachers over cell phones, showed progress in learning that was comparable to the results from a year of standard in-person preschool.Īnd the learning they measured wasn’t just academic. Another 25 million simply watched the show. Over the past few years, 2 million children and their caregivers watched Ahlan Simsim and received coordinated services, some of which were provided entirely over mobile phones. The program combines video content produced by Sesame with services from the IRC, which employs a combination of volunteers from the affected community and professional teachers and parent educators to work locally with families. And the format has already been successfully copied and used in other crises. The results, released in May 2023 but not yet peer reviewed, have been startling: they have provided the first evidence that 100 percent remote learning can help young children in crisis situations. The Sesame Workshop partnered with the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian-aid nonprofit, to win a $100 million grant competition administered by the MacArthur Foundation. The Ahlan Simsim program is the largest-ever humanitarian intervention specifically intended for small children’s development. And yet, points out Sherrie Westin, the head of the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, “less than 2 percent of humanitarian aid worldwide goes to the early years” - that is, specifically supporting care and education, not just food and medicine.
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