PRB

WASHINGTON, January 27, 2023—PRB today announced it has received a $500,000 grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to promote evidence on early childhood development from East and Southern Africa.

The Hilton Foundation is committed to advancing early childhood development in East and Southern Africa as part of its effort to improve the lives of young children living in poverty and experiencing disadvantage throughout the world. Its work in the region focuses on improving developmental outcomes for children ages 0 to 3 in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.

Under the grant, PRB will work with key actors to create and implement a strategy to share evidence around three priority themes: parenting, male engagement in early childhood development and adolescent parenting and population-level measurement of early childhood development.

“The activities funded by this grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation will ensure that global decisionmakers and government and community leaders throughout East and Southern Africa have access to the latest evidence on early childhood development in the right formats and at the right time so they can apply the findings to improve the lives of their youngest populations,” said Barbara Seligman, PRB’s Senior Vice President of International Programs.

The strategy will include key messages and recommendations to increase the reach, use and application of evidence from the region in global programming and investment. To implement the strategy, PRB will help build the skills of spokespeople to share relevant evidence and will create resources to help non-researchers understand the evidence and its implications for action.

“Targeted and trusted communication of evidence and its policy implications can improve knowledge of current challenges, needs and effective practices. It can also encourage global decisionmakers to use the information and apply the findings to improve children’s early development, and it can link regional and global early childhood development networks to ensure their efforts are working in synergy,” said Seligman.

The Foundation has supported rigorous research studies and literature and evidence reviews as part of its five-year strategy (2021-2025) for early childhood development in East and Southern Africa. Its efforts highlight the strong base of evidence available to those working in this field.

About the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

International hotelier Conrad N. Hilton established the grantmaking foundation that bears his name in 1944 to help people living in poverty and experiencing disadvantage worldwide. Today the work continues, concentrating on efforts to ensure healthy early childhood development and sustainable livelihoods for youth, support young people transitioning out of foster care, improve access to housing and support services for people experiencing homelessness, identify solutions to safe water access and lift the work of Catholic sisters. Additionally, following selection by an independent, international jury, the Foundation annually awards the $2.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize to an organization doing extraordinary work to reduce human suffering. The Foundation is one of the world’s largest, with approximately $8.5 billion in assets. It has awarded grants to date totaling more than $2.4 billion, with $339 million worldwide in 2021. Visit www.hiltonfoundation.org for more information.

About PRB

PRB promotes and supports evidence-based policies, practices and decision-making to improve the health and well-being of people throughout the world. Find out more at www.prb.org. Follow us on Twitter @PRBdata.