Seychelles is gearing up to host the second international biennial conference on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) on February 21-23, 2019.
The conference expects to gather an estimated 200 local and 60 international delegates at the ICCS to discuss the progress and initiatives in ECCE since the first biennial conference, also held in Seychelles in 2017.
The second conference is being organised by the government of Seychelles, through a national organising committee led by the Minister for Education and Human Resource Development Jeanne Simeon, in partnership with the Unesco- International Bureau of Education (IBE).
It will focus and explore the importance of data in early childhood through the theme ‘Big Data for Small Children: Monitoring Holistic Early Childhood Development’.
In preparation for the major conference, the national organising committee met representatives of various media outlets yesterday to discuss areas of collaboration and content opportunities for the media houses.
“We did not want to just send a press release to the media to solely request coverage on the days of the conference. Rather, we brought them here as partners in the organisation of this event,” the chief executive of the Institute for Early Childhood Development (IECD), Shirley Choppy, explained.
“It is something that we started in the first conference in 2017 and we are working to reinforce this partnership.”
The objective is to provide the media with details on the conference early on so that they can sufficiently prepare themselves and derive additional broadcast or print content surrounding the conference.
Ms Choppy stated that the media’s mandate to inform and educate the public would be crucial to the second ECCE conference since its theme, big data, is a technical subject.
“Big data is a fairly new concept in Seychelles. It is about collecting, storing, retrieving and analysing data in order to reveal patterns and trends in early childhood development.”
These data can be collected from sectors such as education, health, social and family affairs, law enforcement and other sectors that have collated data in relations to young children.
She stated that these data are currently scattered all over the place in various forms such as in archives, on paper, digitally and on hard drives.
Ms Choppy said that the ability to collect and analyse all these scattered data will allow the country to identify real trends, and consequently come up with targeted and evidence-based approaches to address the various challenges in early childhood.
Departments that are involved in the preparations of the conference include IECD, Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development, Ministry of Family Affairs, Ministry of Health as well as the department of local government.
The national organising committee will also be hosting various side events such as presentations from two international experts from Singapore and France as well as cultural events and educational visits for the delegates.
With around two months left, Ms Choppy said that the committee is satisfied with its preparations so far and its communications team has already intensified the committee’s social media presence.
Source: www.nation.sc
