Each year, the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) hands out awards to innovative projects that address global educational challenges. This year one of the winners is Brazil’s “Criança Feliz” (Happy Child) program. Since October 2016 over 20,000 home visitors have been trained and they have reached nearly 500,000 children and pregnant women across all 27 Brazilian states. The plan is to reach two million beneficiaries by 2023.

Criança Feliz has been described as the world’s biggest ECD experiment, aiming to prove that teaching poor parents how to love and nurture their infants will dramatically influence the kind of adults they become. Drawing upon the same evidence base as the Nurturing Care Framework (more),  the program teaches parents how to provide opportunities for early learning and develops their skills to be responsive caregivers as a means of reducing levels of violence, inequality and poverty.

The Criança Feliz program uses the WHO/UNICEF Care for Child Development package. This package prepares frontline workers to help caregivers build stronger relationships with their children and solve challenges in providing nurturing care.