Reimagining childhood through playful learning for 800,000 refugees in East Africa

The LEGO Foundation’s Playful Learning in Crisis Settings Initiative is improving holistic learning outcomes, coping mechanisms, and resilience for children in protracted and acute refugee settings in East Africa. In this blog, Joe Savage introduces the recently launched PlayMatters grant, which will support more than 800,000 refugee and host community children in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda. Joe also shares why he’s excited about the PlayMatters approach to scaling interventions from potential, to promising, to proven.

Waving goodbye to 2020 did not bring much relief from the pandemic, but January 1 was still personally exciting for me. Once the New Year fireworks died down, I began my new LEGO Foundation role as Initiative Lead for Playful Learning in Crisis Settings (PLiCS).

The quality of learning experiences for refugees and many children in surrounding host communities is of great concern. PLiCS works to improve holistic learning outcomes, coping mechanisms and resilience for refugee and host community children aged 3 to 12 in East Africa. Many of these children will spend their entire childhoods as refugees. Others will have undergone more recent but repeated displacement and face an uncertain future. All face limited access to basic services.

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