The Van Leer Foundation welcomes Karima Grant who joined our team in May as Regional Representative for Africa. Prior to her new role, she was the CEO and founder of two social enterprises: Ker Imagination Education and ImagiNation Afrika.
We interviewed Karima to capture her bold thinking and deeper insights on how leaders and ecosystems across the continent can support children to have the best start in life and continue to grow in beautiful, creative, and sustainable communities.
How would you define your strategic vision for early childhood?
The vision that I have for young children matches the Van Leer Foundation’s. It’s all about how we can create thriving social villages for children in Africa to grow up in and become their best adult selves. I want to see children surrounded by caregivers who love them, nourish them, and facilitate their growth. I also want leaders to feel inspired and create systems that support that.
Across Africa, we need to support and invest in communities that are poor, negatively affected by conflict or poor governance, to better hold children and caregivers. We need our societies to be much more inclusive for the most vulnerable. When we have this, we will be better able to support thriving, sustainable development.
How do you see early childhood development supporting inclusive societies across Africa?
It’s time to reinvent the Early Childhood Development agenda in Africa. As the continent becomes more unified, the more ideas get shared and integrated. The early years are the most important years for any human being, and we have the concept of ‘Ubuntu’ from Southern Africa – I am because you are because we are. This also describes the symbiotic relationships we have with our children.
It’s a very big part of how we organise our families, our units, our villages. So now we’re looking to put that on the agenda. Let’s really think about how we can support them to flourish because when they flourish, we will all flourish.
Ten years from now, I see us looking at all the seeds we are about to plant and how they’ve grown together with other seeds because the efforts are not just ours but of an entire ecosystem. Powerful ideas and initiatives will scale to West Africa from seeds we planted in East Africa, while roots nurtured in Southern Africa will begin to grow in North Africa and so on.
The Van Leer Foundation strongly believes in bringing diverse stakeholders together around the table. Who are you looking to partner with to scale programmes and policies that support children and caregivers?
The joy and the challenge will be to get more people involved in this mission. Not only having others share a message but also supporting key organisations and parents directly. The Foundation has invested across the continent since 1949. In the past decade our work focused in Côte D’Ivoire and Ethiopia. For the new strategy cycle, we are looking more broadly to build new partnerships. Initially, one of the things that we’re doing is mapping who’s doing what beyond the terrific, established NGO sector in Africa. We are speaking to governments but also exploring who else we can bring in to address the support gaps that we still see around children and their caregivers.
I love the way Africa’s arts and culture have become dominant globally. I’m interested in exploring collaboration with the culture, communication, and private sectors (i.e. media houses and telecommunication industries). We are also thinking about the diaspora, who we know are very involved in community development. For me personally, this opportunity also means looking at the younger generations who are assuming leadership roles, launching businesses, and through it all becoming parents themselves.
“For me personally, this opportunity also means looking at the younger generations who are assuming leadership roles, launching businesses, and through it all becoming parents themselves.”
~ Karima Grant, Regional Representative Africa, Van Leer Foundation
In your first month you travelled to Addis Ababa, where we currently have a partnership with the local government and other Foundations. What inspired you most by their approach and the progress that you saw there?
It was seeing the buy-in at every level of society of a vision for a better African early childhood. The Mayor of Addis Ababa, Adanech Abiebie, I mean, she is really a champion for early childhood. I haven’t heard another African mayor, not only declare publicly, but also present a clear mandate that puts the systems in place to make positive change happen.
On this trip, when we visited the playstreet and playground initiatives we are supporting, children would run up to Mayor Abiebie. I’m talking about 2-year-olds running up to her, hugging her knees, jumping on her. You could sense that the children recognised her as somebody who loves children and that the message “Addis cares for its children” has also reached them.
Is the vision in Addis also inspiring others and who do you think could play a leadership role in building a better future for children across Africa?
When you have someone like Mayor Abiebie, who goes beyond rhetoric, you realise her leadership inspires other people to become champions. For a leader, it takes hard work, difficult conversations, and collaboration with a variety of different partners to have everybody aligned behind the vision of a better future for all young children and families.
I’m thinking specifically about the Mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone, Yvonne Aki-Sawyer, she is so dynamic. And the Mayor of Lusaka in Zambia, Chilando Chitangala. Both are strong women like Addis Mayor Abiebie.
What I loved seeing in Addis, and what I see in these women, is a concrete vision. Not the dreamlike vision that happens in election cycles. But visions that can mobilise government structures and systems, visions that have the power to sustain people.
Other representatives from Nairobi County and Zanzibar were also wonderful. You could see they were taking everything in. We’ve heard echoes that they’ve really taken on the early years mandate and made the commitment to advancing it in their cities or regions.
“What I loved seeing in Addis, and what I see in these women, is a concrete vision. Not the dreamlike vision that happens in election cycles. But visions that can mobilise government structures and systems, visions that have the power to sustain people.”
~ Karima Grant, Regional Representative Africa, Van Leer Foundation
You worked with the Van Leer Foundation as a partner a couple of years ago with ImagiNation Afrika. How has this experience influenced your ideas for future partnerships?
What I loved about the Foundation when we met through Urban95 in 2019 is that Van Leer understood innovation in early childhood development like no other foundation. There are so many ways to think about it, but core to innovation is reframing. When partnering with the Foundation, I was met with the question: how can you rethink this problem and what impact might happen?
It was wonderful. We worked with people in the tech sector on a human-centred design study to really capture the experiences of parents and children. The Foundation shared their Urban95 virtual reality tool, and we did advocacy with people who had never thought of challenges facing 3-year-olds. The technology offered another perspective; it helped partners in the private sector and in government to “see” our cities from the perspective of 95cm (height of a young child) and understand how important it was to move their realities to the centre of our concerns.
The Foundation is now looking to reframe and deepen our collective understanding on parent and caregiver wellbeing. What are the challenges for parents in Africa and where do you see opportunities?
The Foundation is strong at telling powerful stories and putting language to the most pressing problems of our time. When we can put language to problems, then we can begin to understand them at various levels; to unpack them and even see where the opportunities are. We know now how closely linked our health and our mental wellbeing are to our children’s healthy development. So, we need to re-imagine how to better support our children, if we ourselves have what we need to be healthier parents.
So, more storytelling is really part of problem solving. In Africa, conversations are already happening about wellbeing and caregiving. For example, women across the continent have been thinking for so many years about gender issues, feminism and their implications on mental health. Men are also speaking more openly about their mental health. Human resource directors across the continent are remarking on this, that there is a generation that is really concerned about their wellbeing. People in this same generation are becoming parents. But we’re not grouping these two ideas together as caregiver wellbeing yet.
We can address many of our societal worries by talking about parental wellbeing and creating or identifying ecosystems of support and building them up. For example, there are many stakeholders working on parental support and mental health in displaced communities in Uganda. Conversations are also happening in Ethiopia and Kenya. So, I think our challenge at the Foundation is going to be where to start.
Where will you start?
My early years really formed me, and I had a mother who affirmed me from the very beginning as this creative and enormously talkative person. Our first steps are about powerful conversations and scoping. In the next two or three months, we are talking to a broad section of partners, officials in government, institutions and people implementing programmes throughout the region. Bringing in people and getting as many different voices as possible in the room talking, while thinking about how we can continue to build a powerful ecosystem that sustainably supports and nurtures children and their caregivers — that will be my starting point.
