Early Childhood Development Initiative

Ba Futuru's Early Childhood Development Initiative has made amazing progress both in our preschool and through our Teacher Training of preschool teachers and other early childhood educators.

In the last year and a half more than 150 educators have passed through our training programs representing more than 40 preschools in 5 districts of Timor-Leste. These trainings are designed to improve the quality of early childhood education across Timor-Leste, helping to make it more child-centred, focused on learning through play, and participatory. There are also elements of the training that focus on nutrition, first aid, child protection and positive discipline to equip teachers with essential skills for improving the lives of their students.

According to the 2009 World Bank Reading Assessment of Timor-Leste, more than 70 percent of students at the end of first grade could not read a single word in Tetun nor Portuguese (the two official languages). This research has informed our future plans, so in the next stage of our project we plan to include a larger focus on working with educators to develop their ability to teach literacy and numeracy.

We are also hoping to further develop our scholarship program for our preschool, in order that we can provide high quality education to more at-risk and low income children. So far we have been able to provide more than 20 low income Timorese children with a great start to their education by offering them early childhood education in our international preschool, which is used both to benefit children directly and also to mentor teachers after they receive training.

We thank you for your support of this important work, and if you have not already we encourage you to sign up for a small monthly donation to help us continue to provide low income scholarships for Timorese children.