Pashe Achhi: A Low-Tech Model of Learning and Psychosocial Support for Children and Caregivers

Abstract

Pashe Achhi is a telecommunication model that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh to provide support to 0- to 5-year-old children and their caregivers through mobile-to-mobile phone calls. It is a caregiver-child facing and/or only caregiver focused, low-resource, low-tech model that constitutes a 20-minute phone call. The phone calls include a 10-minute psychosocial support segment to caregivers and a 10-minute stimulation segment to their children through play. After the initial intervention period during the pandemic, this model has been tested further and evaluated based on two modalities: 5-month and 9-month interventions. An experimental study design using randomized assignment of the treatment and comparison group was used for this evaluation. The improvement in cognitive development scores among children has been found to be higher after 5 months than after 9 months of intervention. The model has implications for further research as an early childhood development (ECD) solution during crisis situations and ECD access to children of ultra-poor households.