Caregiving and Children’s Preschool Attendance: A Case of Tharaka Nithi Preschool Randomized Controlled Trial Intervention Project

Caregiving is a service provided for children with the primary objective of taking care of them and ensuring that they are safe and have opportunities to learn and develop positive relationships with their caregivers and peers while their parents are away. Caregiving takes the forms of home-based care, centre-based care, school-based care, family child care and family, friend, and neighbour (FFN) care. The paper utilises preliminary findings on school attendance from a randomised controlled trial on the effects of a preschool intervention on child learning and women’s economic empowerment in Tharaka Nithi County in school-based care. The research sought to test whether a preschool-based intervention in a rural setting in Kenya influences child development and women’s labour market participation in a cost-effective manner. The project examines the impact of allowing three-year-old children to attend preschool versus the regular pre-primary education programming, which allows children aged 4 years and above to attend preschool. Implementation of the intervention started in January 2024 in 60 intervention schools where five three-year-old children were admitted to a playgroup (PG) in the pre-primary one (PP1) class. Twelve mentors and sixty caregivers were recruited and trained alongside sixty PP1 teachers from the sampled preschools to implement an adapted PP1 curriculum. The twelve mentors coached teachers weekly on the implementation of the curriculum in the five schools assigned to them. This paper presents preliminary findings on preschool attendance for the PG and PP1 children based on weekly attendance data from term one and term two of the 2024 school calendar year on the day the mentors visited the school. Findings reveal that school attendance was low during school openings, midterm breaks, and the last weeks before the schools closed. Public holidays, as well as extracurricular activities coupled with children being sent home for school levies, also contributed to children not attending school regularly. The findings further show that the attendance rate in term one was slightly higher than in term two.