African children and capacity building at Unisa’s heart
Hasina Banu Ebrahim is a full professor at the University of South Africa and the UNESCO Co-chair in Early Education Care and Development. Her research interests cohere around the theme Early Childhood at the Margins. This theme is developed in policy, practice and teacher education in the early years. She is the Institutional Lead for a European Union-funded project entitled Project for Inclusive Early Childhood Care and Education (PIECCE). She won the UNISA 2017 Women in Research Award in the category of Leadership. Her latest book (in press) is a co-edited volume entitled Early Childhood At the Margins: African Perspectives on Birth to Four.
“Africa has a rich cultural heritage that serves as a resource to shape the lives of African children,” says Unisa’s Professor Hasina Ebrahim, joint holder of the UNESCO Chair in Early Childhood Education, Care and Development.
Ebrahim’s main priority as co-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Early Childhood Education, Care and Development is to ensure that African research on early childhood policy, practice and teacher development is foregrounded. “We need a new cadre of scholars and researchers in the continent,” says Ebrahim, who is herself considered part of the new wave of early childhood researchers in Africa and has served as the director of institutes for building the capacity of early childhood researchers in South Africa, and broadly in Africa.
“There should be a concerted effort to promote research highlighting African realities and conditions impacting on child outcomes,” she says. “If this is approached in a more robust way, then our interventions will meet the criteria of context responsiveness. We need our own evidence to highlight our issues and map a way forward.”
For example, research has shown that there are significant inequities between Grade R children from poor and affluent families. “Children have developmental delays because of poverty and multiple-problem families. School is a whole new, unknown world to these children, some of whom have never seen a chair, for instance, and have to learn that this is something you sit on. Everything about school is new and strange to some children from backgrounds of poverty.”