PlayMatters

PlayMatters is an IRC-led consortium funded by the LEGO Foundation that cultivates holistic learning and wellbeing outcomes for refugee and host-community children aged 3-12+ in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda through Learning through Play methodologies.

PlayMatters (2020-2025) aims to promote Learning through Play (LtP) to improve refugee and host-community children’s holistic learning and development in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. PlayMatters is led by the IRC and includes Plan International, War Child Holland, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Behavioral Insight Team in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. Over a five-year period, PlayMatters will support over 800,000 children ages 3-12+ who have been affected by displacement and trauma. PlayMatters works across four target pillars for its intervention: LtP with educators, LtP with parents and caregivers, LtP in communities, and LtP in education systems. Additionally, PlayMatters integrates the cross-cutting themes of gender, inclusion and protection into its approaches.

What is Learning through Play?

LtP is a methodology for enhancing children’s cognitive, social, creative, emotional, and physical skills through the integration of child-centered and play-based interactions into homes, communities, Early Childhood Development (ECD) centers and primary schools. Key ingredients of LtP include; i) children being actively engaged, ii) relating new experiences to what they already know (i.e., play being meaningful), iii) children enjoying a task for its own sake and the thrill of surprise, insight, or success after overcoming challenging experiences, iv) iteration—trying out possibilities, revising hypotheses and discovering new questions, and v) social interactiveness—so that children are able to communicate thoughts, share ideas, understand others and enjoy being with them and build stronger relationships.

PlayMatters’ Comprehensive Research Agenda

As one of the first large-scale programs implementing LtP, PlayMatters contributes to the growing global body of evidence that suggests play is one of the most important ways in which young children develop essential knowledge and skills and build resilience. The PlayMatters consortium has devised a strategic Research Agenda centered around the overarching research question: “What is the impact of Learning through Play approaches on children’s holistic learning outcomes and resilience?”. PlayMatters has developed a strategic path to scale, starting with initial formative research and prototyping to at-scale program evaluations. Throughout the project duration, PlayMatters is conducting numerous studies ranging in methodology, including quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods, as relevant with the project’s path to scale. The PlayMatters research agenda addresses 27 key research questions across the four programmatic target pillars divided by the four following types of research:

1. Project Development: Formative research focusing on understanding a problem, context, population, or the process by which outcomes can be influenced. Design research uses field research to uncover our users’ needs, values and existing behaviors as they relate to a specific intervention or product.
2. Project Implementation: Implementation science helps to identify program implementation processes and factors which affect program quality, efficiency and effectiveness as well as the service delivery strategies that yield the best outcomes.
3. Impact Evaluation: Impact/Effectiveness research analyzes the change that can be attributed to a particular intervention.
4. Cost Analysis: Cost efficiency analyses measures the cost per output of a particular project or program. Cost effectiveness analysis measures the cost per outcome of a particular project or program.

To increase the rigor and validity of our research, and to develop local ownership and capacity of emerging evidence, PlayMatters has signed Memoranda of Understanding with local universities in each country to partner with local researchers as Co-Principal Investigators on all studies.