Lively Minds

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.

That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven to get pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources.  The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.

Over the past few years the Lively Minds programme has been delivered in over 350 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda reaching over 50,000 children. During COVID we launched a radio programme for parents and this is now reaching over 2million households each week. We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1million children. We see this partnership as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale in Uganda and elsewhere within the next 5 years.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard, at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.