As the crisis in Ukraine puts the spotlight on the millions of displaced children, the Lego Foundation is racing to provide $16.5 million to help them. The emergency grants come as the fund is also seeking applicants for one of its most ambitious efforts to encourage humanitarian groups and other nonprofits to develop innovative learning programs.
In the past five years, the Lego Foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants to improve early-childhood education around the world, and its new $143 million effort, which will support 10 groups, is its largest grants competition yet.
Supporting education for young children has taken on new urgency, not just because of war but also because millions of students in the United States and elsewhere have faced learning challenges during the pandemic.
Nonprofits and groups of nonprofits around the world may compete for the Build a World of Play Challenge grants. Ten finalists will receive $1 million each to fine-tune and carry out the proposals they submit. Three of those finalists will receive about $30 million each, and two will get $15 million.
Lego is especially eager to attract proposals that incorporate play into learning activities. For young children, play is their superpower, Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of the Lego Foundation. and it will have a positive impact on their learning process.
“Play is the way that they explore the world, that they build relationships, that they deal with stress, anxiety. Lots of positive things, all in the early years, come with play,” she added.
Grants will be awarded to groups that propose innovative solutions for families to obtain quality early-childhood education and care and adequate nutrition. Grants also will support finding solutions to toxic stress in homes and communities, reducing violence, and supporting the overall well-being of families.
The need for early-childhood education and related activities is shown in a 2019 United Nations Children’s Fund report, which indicates that many children who fall behind during their early years never catch up. The agency says universal early education would be a great benefit and investment, but the expansion of it around the world is slow and has disparities.
Past Prizes
This isn’t the Lego Foundation’s first competition. It has been working with Lever for Change since 2017 on prizes to spur innovation.
As part of the effort with Lever for Change, a spinoff of the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition designed to draw more donors to fund ambitious nonprofit efforts, Lego gave Sesame Street Workshop and the International Rescue Committee a total of $100 million to continue their efforts to support children in Syria and Bangladesh.
Sesame Street then created a television show in Syria using Muppets to help caregivers teach children displaced by the conflict in their region. It’s called Ahlan Simsim, which means “Welcome Sesame” in Arabic. The show now airs in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
In 2019, Lego continued its focus on supporting education when it gave the International Rescue Committee a $100 million, five-year grant for a program called PlayMatters. The goal was to provide education that strengthens the resilience, emotional, cognitive, physical, and creative skills of students in Ethiopia and Uganda.
The committee worked with teachers to design ways to incorporate play into the classroom, but before the plan could be put into place, the Covid pandemic struck so things shifted.
Mike Mina, a spokesman for PlayMatters, said the charity’s staff developed ways to ensure children were still learning while at home. The PlayMatters team created what it called interactive home learning packets with games that focused on literacy, math, social emotional learning, and Covid-19 preventative messages.
“And because East Africa is a very, very diverse region in terms of the refugee population, especially if you look at Uganda and Tanzania, we had to develop these packets in 18 different languages and in a very short period of time,” said Mina, who is based in Uganda.
Then they hopped on a motorbike to deliver the packets to the students.
Mina said the charity’s staff members also worked with radio stations in the refugee camps to broadcast the programs. If radios weren’t available, they passed out flash drives or discs with videos and photographs of the lessons.
The testing for the in-person program will begin in April, but its newly developed home learning program has reached more than 200,000 refugee children as well as kids in the cities and towns that are housing large numbers of refugee kids.
Play and Resilience
Making play part of learning is not always the standard in early childhood education, said Katie Murphy, who works on early childhood development at the committee, but it is where the charity has seen the most progress in both young and older students. Still, she says, it’s tough to push for play in elementary and secondary education since it’s seen as an approach geared to the youngest students.
When it comes educating students who are refugees, programs around the world have historically placed a focus on survival without thinking of long-term solutions, Murphy said.
“This kind of play-based approach, I don’t think has been front and center for a lot of the planning around refugee education,” she added.
Albrectsen said Lego has found play is important for early childhood development, especially for children in refugee settings.
“What we are seeing is that play and play-based learning really strengthens children’s resilience in situations where obviously many of them, or at least their parents, have been traumatized by the conflict that they have fled from,” she said.
Build a World of Play Challenge applicants must register by April 7, and the deadline to submit an application is May 17.
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.
