Monitoring an early childhood development programme: From guessing to knowing

Abstract

The Home Instruction Foundation (HIF), which implemented the Home Instruction Preparatory Programme for Pre-School Youngsters (Hippy), and researchers from the Department of Sociology at the University of the Orange Free State collaborated in designing emolment forms and progress reports for the Hippy programme. These served as monitoring devices and to collect base-line information for evaluation activities. Two important trends were identified in the data. The first was that the poor performances of the participants in the third month of the programme indicated that they experienced problems in this phase of the programme. The second main finding was that participants from the Soutpan area performed markedly better than participants from the Botshabelo area. This is ascribed to various socio-economic factors and demographic realities. These findings may enhance the management and planning of these programmes or similar programmes in the area of early childhood development.