Ecuador and Its Adaptation Strategy to Care for the Youngest During Times of Crisis

In order to care for the most vulnerable people in times of crisis, social protection systems need to be adaptive and resilient –– that is, they need to be able to adjust and respond flexibly and efficiently to different emergency scenarios. At the Regional Policy Dialogue, we met with policy and decision-makers from Latin America and the Caribbean to review and discuss best practices in the region.

There, we shared Ecuador’s experience, a country that has shown itself resilient despite being forced to respond to multiple natural and human-caused disasters in recent years. In this post, we tell you about the innovations developed by the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion (MIES) ‘s child development services, in collaboration with the IDB team, to ensure continuity and care for children and their families in emergencies.

Adaptation to the Threat of El Niño

The Undersecretariat for Integral Child Development of the MIES offers two main child development services for the most vulnerable population: the Child Development Centers (“Centros de Desarrollo Infantil” or CDI), where educators attend daily to nearly 79 thousand children between 1 and 3 years of age, and the Growing with our Children (“Creciendo con Nuestros Hijos” or CNH) service, which offers home visits and group sessions to almost 191 thousand pregnant women and families with children under 3 years of age. 

Since mid-2023, the threat of a severe El Niño phenomenon in the country has been growing. And for the Undersecretariat for Integral Child Development, it was essential to maintain the continuity of its services in the affected territories with three objectives:

1. Minimize learning losses due to interruptions in attention.
2. Accompanying families.
3. Support educators in the territory and offer them coping strategies.

Thus, in less than two months, together with the Undersecretariat team, we developed:

1. A protocol for virtual care –by video call, phone call or WhatsApp messages– for those families who could not access the CDI or whose communities were not reached by the educators.
2. A second protocol for face-to-face, group attention in shelters for families who find themselves in these spaces.
3. Guidelines for providing emotional support to families and self-care for frontline workers.
4. And a remote and cascade training strategy, organized in three levels: first, 9 analysts from the central team, who trained 2,258 territorial coordinators, who in turn were to train nearly 14 thousand educators -although only 59% of the territorial team was reached, since the rains arrived before we did in these territories.

What Were the Keys to a Quick Response?

We can talk about three keys. First, listening to the territory: we organized virtual sessions with sectors affected by floods prior to El Niño to understand how they were organized and to validate preliminary versions of the protocols we were developing.

The second was coordinating with third parties: we worked, for example, with the Vice-Ministry’s team to identify the most at-risk territories and the order of response and with UNICEF to compile materials for psychological support and self-care.

Finally, our earlier work to ensure continuity of child development services during the pandemic: the Virtual and Semi-Presential Care Protocol or PAVS. The PAVS consisted of a first basic document, with activity sheets – based on the Reach Up Parent Handbook – and scripts, which was then strengthened with detailed guidelines, for example: how to compose effective text messages or film effective videos, or how to track children’s progress, among others. During the pandemic, PAVS reached 288,000 families! Post-COVID, the MIES continued to activate this protocol in situations that affect normal on-site care, such as the declaration of internal armed conflict in January of this year.

What Did We Learn from These Experiences and What Lies Ahead?

Faced with the risk of El Niño, we wanted to provide a comprehensive response and not only answer to floods but to all types of emergencies. We developed a completely virtual protocol and another one for shelters – not considered during COVID-19, but essential in the event of natural disasters.

We learned that WhatsApp is a very powerful tool – sending videos and audios helps a lot in communicating with families and even in training processes. But, for this, families and educators require devices, connectivity and data plans. A resilient service must be able to guarantee remote contact with its users. It is also important to think about how to provide technical accompaniment and solid socioemotional support to territorial teams remotely and in a timely manner.

Perhaps our greatest learning is that no matter how much we prepare, the response will always remain adaptive, and we will incorporate new learning as we go along. Designing a broad response framework that allows for adaptation, constant transformation – in the face of each new emergency or each new solution – seems to be key to being able to arrive in time where it is most needed. Do you know of adaptive response experiences in your country? Let us know in the comments!