The LEGO Foundation is awarding a £11 million five-year grant to international research led by the Department of Social Policy & Intervention in developing and providing free, evidence-based, playful parenting support to every parent all over the world.
The grant to the Global Parenting Initiative (GPI) is led by the University of Oxford with partner universities, organisations and implementers around the world, including in South Africa, Canada, Malaysia, Philippines, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, and the UK.
Leading the Oxford contribution are Dr Jamie Lachman and Professor Lucie Cluver, part of the team behind the highly successful research-based COVID-19 playful parenting emergency response, created with UN agencies and other partners, and, more recently, online support for families affected by the war in Ukraine.
With the support of the LEGO Foundation, the GPI aims rapidly to develop and evaluate playful parenting programmes to improve at-scale child learning outcomes and reduce violence against children.
These will be delivered through in-person, remote, digital, multimedia and hybrid platforms and have been co-developed by Parenting for Lifelong Health with children and families in the Global South. The project includes nine state-of-the-art research-within-implementation studies focused on increasing the evidence of effectiveness and scalability of these programmes.
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