Early learning for Mozambican children

The first 5 years of life are widely considered critical for a child's growth and development. For this reason, we play close attention to the nutrition of our preschool students, measuring height and weight and tracking in relation to their age. The chart below shows the weight for age for female children at Bombôfo preschool at the start of the school year (February 2023).

The blue dots represent the children who attended MSLI's preschool last year, and the red dots represent the children who have not attended preschool yet. The blue line is the median weight-for-age, as defined by the World Health Organization. Children with measurements close to this line are in the healthy range. The red line indicates the weight-for-age that classifies a child as underweight. We are very pleased to see that only one female student who previously attended MSLI's preschool in Bombôfo falls into that category.

To improve the nutrition we are providing to the preschool students, in April, we kicked off a partnership with Higest, a chicken inputs company in Mozambique, which agreed to support the start-up of a chicken-egg cooperative in one of our villages. The Higest professionals trained a group of four farmers (three women) and donated 208 laying hens, the equipment, and enough chicken feed for the group's first month of production. The cooperative is now producing about 200 eggs every day, which MSLI is buying and integrating directly into our school lunch program for added nutrition for the preschool students.  Eggs have one of the most digestible forms for protein, and the kids love them! This project has been a sustainable way to increase access to nutritious foods for the preschool kids, while also benefiting the local farmers who are now earning an income by selling eggs.

We are excited to start the 2023 school year with more preschool students than ever in our two community-based preschools in Chokwe district, Mozambique. 

Last year we were able to track major improvements in the learning for the preschool students, so we are excited to see so many children enrolling in our program.

2022 was the first full year of our preschool program in Duvane and Bombôfo villages, and we measured substantial learning for the children in the program. The MSLI team implemented learning evaluations every trimester for our 5-year-old children, and we found significant improvements by the end of the year.

For example, one of the questions asked the students to identify numbers written randomly on the chalkboard: 4, 9, 3, 2, 8, 1, 5, 7, 10, 6. At the end of the first trimester, students got an average of 5.56 numbers correct. By the end of the third trimester, the students got an average 8.37 numbers correct. These children are now much better prepared for the first grade this year.

We will continue tracking these results throughout the 2023 school year! Thank you for your support of these children in Mozambique.