Ph.D, has been working for over 10 years with Aga Khan Foundation (AKF). She is currently a Senior Programme Officer responsible for overall program planning, management, monitoring and policy dialogue related to AKF’s Early Childhood Development Programmes, in particular, but also including Primary Education Programmes often in close collaboration with AKF staff - in South Asia, Eastern Africa, Tajikistan, Portugal, USA and Syria. Kathy is also the Co-director of the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Development, an international consortium of donor agencies, NGOs and regional networks working to improve the conditions of young children and families through knowledge networking and policy advocacy (since April 1999). She has a vast experience of working as a teacher trainer at pre- and primary levels: 2 years in the U.S., 2 years in Honduras and as Peace Corp Trainer for the Integrated Early Childhood Development Programme in Costa Rica. She represents AKF at selected international fora, particularly those related to ECD and basic education and prepares related papers, presentations and other communication materials for wide dissemination. She has also co-organized Strategy Session on ECCD global trends and future directions at the World Education Forum on behalf of the Consultative Group on ECCD, Dakar, Senegal, April 2000
Q. Why did you choose to work in the field of Early Childhood Development?
For as long as I can remember I have wanted to work with children. This may be in part because of my own family background as well as the experiences I had starting out as a Bilingual Kindergarten teacher working with mainly immigrant and migrant children in a small rural town in Southern California. In both cases, the issue of social support systems for young children and their families, especially the caregivers, is the dominant theme. Watching my father cope as a single parent, and seeing how my extended family came in and supported him created a Lasting impression. All this, I think, fed into my working and evolving beliefs of what children need, and what families need to raise and care for their children, and give them enough love and support.
Q. When did you realize that merely teaching children is not enough and when did you want to venture beyond the confines of the classroom?
When I was teaching, many of the 32 or so children I had in Kindergarten came from migrant families who moved around during the school year. Usually half my class did not speak any English when they arrived and another quarter sp- oke only a little. The families lived on very limited incomes, many were at or below the poverty line and some were illegal. I was with the children for only half a day, and then they would go home – or somewhere. Their fathers and mothers were out in the fields all day. I never knew what they were going ho- me to; I never knew who was going to be there. I wanted to go out and visit the families, and talk to the parents (I spoke Spanish). I would say that many if not most of my teacher colleagues didn’t seem to worry about this and my pr-incipal, (the head teacher) didn’t believe in making visits to students’ homes and interact with families and the students in their home environment. I grew increasingly frustrated with this since during parent-teacher conferences it seemed clear the mothers and fathers were open to and needed extra support.
By the third year, I had begun to think about working within the migrant ed-ucation system in California which would allow me to work more closely with the children and families, but my Spanish needed to be improved. I decided then to join the U.S. Peace Corps as a volunteer and was eventually assigned to Honduras where I lived for 2 ½ years in a very rural and small village. I look back at my life now and see this as a significant point of change in my personal and professional life. The frustrations I had as a teacher disappeared when I lived with a young – and newly married couple – in a one-room home in a village of twelve houses. There was no running water and electricity; I took bath and washed my clothes in the river with the other women and helped gather water from the well. My job was to work as the local coordinator for a Honduran NGO that was piloting family-centres that provided pre-school services to young children from our and other nearby communities. I trained and worked with adolescent girls (the pre-school teachers) and helped develop a curriculum for the pre-school programme. I worked with local women’s income-generating as well as with the men in raising awareness and support for our ECD programme. My earlier frustrations as a teacher disapp- eared. It wasn’t a choice of whether I co-uld only do this, or that; I was able and encouraged to work with children, youth, parents, and the wider community. In Ho- nduras, I discovered and began to work in what is now a life-long passion: understanding and finding appropriate ways to support young children and families.
