A regional play-based learning initiative

Learning through play, made regional.

One programme. Four strands. Eight countries that already agreed on the destination.

From communiqué to classroom, in one box of bricks.

The opening

The region agreed. It just hasn’t reached the classroom.

The 2nd EAC Regional Education Conference put foundational learning, social and emotional learning, and parental engagement at the centre of the agenda, and named the same method every time: play. That consensus is real. Right now it lives in communiqués.

What was said

Prioritise foundational learning and SEL, involve parents, and get there through playful, child-centred teaching.

What is missing

A concrete programme teachers can run, comparable across countries, with the training and measurement already attached.

What SELution adds

Four play-based strands on one pathway, designed for low-resource classrooms, ready to pilot with partners already asking.

The challenge, in numbers

The region is not behind on coding and robotics. It has not started.

Across the eight EAC partner states, an illustrative 0.7% of schools have a robotics kit in pupils’ hands and 1.4% run any structured coding activity, plugged or unplugged. Underneath that, roughly one Grade 3 pupil in four reads at grade level and about one primary school in seven timetables and assesses social and emotional learning. These are not four separate problems: a child who cannot read a sequence of instructions cannot debug one, and a classroom without emotional safety cannot sustain the collaborative, failure-heavy work that coding and robotics demand. SELution is built for that whole stack, and it starts where the numbers are lowest.

0% Grade 3 pupils reading at grade level, region-wide 2030 target 70% · 37% of target met

0% Primary schools timetabling & assessing SEL, region-wide 2030 target 60% · 23% of target met

0.0% Primary schools running any coding activity, region-wide 2030 target 40% · 3% of target met

0.0% Schools with a robotics kit in pupils' hands, region-wide 2030 target 20% · 3% of target met

True national borders, equirectangular projection (Natural Earth). Rwanda and Burundi are too small to label at map scale: their figures are called out beside the map on wider screens, and in the table at every size. Country area is geographic, not a measure, use the table for like-for-like comparison.

Share achieved, one fixed 0–100% ruler for all four strands

Target 70%

0515305075100%

The palest band means “almost nothing there”. No partner state reaches the top three bands on any strand, and on coding and robotics all eight sit in the palest band.

**Illustrative gap figures by partner state and strand.** Every value is a **share achieved**, so higher is better and the shortfall to the gold target tick is the gap. Figures are **synthetic and for design purposes only**; they are modelled to be plausible and internally consistent, not measured. Regional rows are weighted by primary enrolment. Bars below 1% are drawn at a minimum width so they stay visible.
Partner state	Grade 3 reading% · target 70%	SEL timetabled% · target 60%	Unplugged coding% · target 40%	Robotics in use% · target 20%
	46%	27%	3.5%	1.8%
	34%	16%	1.2%	0.5%
	24%	14%	1.6%	0.7%
	31%	30%	3.1%	2.0%
	21%	9%	0.5%	0.2%
	7%	6%	0.3%	0.1%
	14%	7%	0.6%	0.2%
	5%	5%	0.4%	0.1%
Region (weighted)	26%	14%	1.4%	0.7%

Definitions. Grade 3 reading, share of Grade 3 pupils who read a grade-level passage and answer at least 80% of comprehension items correctly. SEL timetabled, share of public primary schools with a scheduled and assessed SEL block of at least 30 minutes a week, taught by a teacher who has had SEL training; presence in the written curriculum is far more common than delivery, and this metric measures delivery. Unplugged coding, share of public primary schools running any structured computational-thinking activity in a normal term, no device required. Robotics, share of primary and lower-secondary schools with a functioning robotics or physical-computing kit used with pupils in the last term, in use rather than owned. Method. Regional figures are weighted by primary enrolment (DR Congo 18.0m, Tanzania 11.0m, Uganda 9.0m, Kenya 8.5m, Rwanda 2.5m, Burundi 2.2m, South Sudan 1.4m, Somalia 1.1m; 53.7m total), so DR Congo pulls the regional average well below the regional median. Source. Synthetic dataset, SELution design council, 2026. Not for citation.

The offer

Four strands, one pathway

Each strand is a set of structured play activities with a clear learning target, a teacher script, and simple materials. They share one training pathway and one progress record, so a school runs them as a single programme.

Strand 01

Social & emotional learning

Naming feelings, turn-taking, calming routines, friendship and conflict repair. The backbone the other three strands lean on.

A session looks like A 20-minute circle game: children pass a feelings ball or a Six Bricks tower, act out a scenario, and agree one class rule. No printing needed.

Strand 02

Foundational literacy & numeracy

Letter sounds, decoding, number sense and early operations through games, songs and manipulatives, mapped to the national curriculum.

A session looks like Teams build words or number bonds from Six Bricks and bottle-cap tiles against a timer, then teach their answer to another team. The score is the assessment.

Strand 03

Unplugged coding

Sequencing, loops, debugging and algorithms with no device: floor grids, arrow cards, and children as the robot following each other’s instructions.

A session looks like One child writes an arrow-card program, another walks the grid, the class debugs the wrong turns together. Pure logic, zero electricity.

Strand 04

Robotics

The same computational thinking, now with a physical build: low-cost motors, recycled materials and a small kit shared across a cluster of schools.

A session looks like Groups build and program a line-follower or a grabber from a shared kit, present it, and pass the kit to the next school on a rota.

Strands 03 and 04 are one continuum: unplugged coding needs nothing, robotics adds a shared kit when a cluster is ready. A school can start with strands 01 and 02 alone.

The method

Play is the spine, not a decoration

Construction, not instruction. Children build understanding by making and re-making, not by being told. Every strand runs on the same five-beat cycle, which is what makes four strands feel like one programme and what the evidence says actually shifts foundational outcomes.

Goalone target

Gamea rule to play by

Rolesevery child in

Reflectwhat did we learn

Record10-second note

The record at the end feeds one simple progress view per child, aggregated to class, school and cluster. That is the measurement spine partners and funders see.

Six Bricks

Six DUPLO bricks on every desk. Short games that wake up the brain and build self-regulation, curiosity, memory, sequencing and early numeracy. The workhorse of the SEL and literacy strands.

Play method

Floor grids & arrow cards

Sequencing, loops and debugging drawn in chalk, with children as the robot. No device, no power.

Unplugged coding

Bottle-cap tiles

A free, endless manipulative for letters, sounds, number bonds and place value. Every school already has the caps.

Literacy & numeracy

Recycled-parts builds

Motors, wheels and card from a shared kit. Robotics that a cluster of schools can actually afford.

Robotics

SELution did not invent these. It packages proven low-cost play methods into one training pathway and one record. Six Bricks is an established DUPLO-based approach; SELution’s activities draw on it and adapt it to each national curriculum.

In the room

A session, not a slide

Real play sessions, and the team that runs them. The whole programme is a box of bricks, a script, and coaching. Nothing here needs power or a procurement cycle.

A facilitator with arms open leads a large circle of uniformed pupils seated on benches under an acacia tree outside a rural Kenyan school; pupils' faces are blurred — No hall, no projector. A tree and a circle is a classroom.

A teacher holds up a brick stack while about twenty-five uniformed pupils sit on the floor, each with coloured bricks in hand — Twenty-five children, one box of bricks, every hand busy.

Coloured word bricks on a small whiteboard spelling the sentence I am playing on my pretty phone — A sentence you build with your hands stays built.

A pupil kneels on a school field arranging a line of coloured bricks as a program — Sequencing and debugging, taught outside, with nothing plugged in.

A paper coordinate grid on a table with a start brick and a long row of instruction bricks laid out as a program — An arrow-card program and a paper grid. This is what coding costs here.

A facilitator leans over a pupil writing on a mini whiteboard, word bricks on the desk between them — One learner coaching the next. The cascade, in miniature.

A play and training room with a screen reading Can we code, showing brick icons for move forward, turn and stop, and tables set up with brick programs — Move forward, turn, stop. A first algorithm, three colours of brick.

Coloured word bricks spelling an Afrikaans sentence, Ek speel op die geel en groen gras — The same game, in whatever language the class thinks in.

A stack of six coloured DUPLO bricks on a table, a play room of models blurred behind — Six bricks. The entire kit for two of the four strands.

A team member beside display cases of large LEGO Technic machine models at a LEGO Education facility — From six bricks to this. Robotics is the same path, a few years on.

Four members of the team in an office full of play materials, one taking the selfie — Built by people who run the sessions, not just write about them.

Watch a session

The debugger is the whole class shouting “left, no, your other left”.

No screen. The program is bricks; the computer is a friend walking a grid.

A coding lesson on the grass, for the price of a box of bricks.

A whiteboard, six bricks, and a sentence that clicks together.

Faces are blurred in these clips to protect pupil privacy.

The references

Every strand maps to something the region already committed to

SELution is not a new priority to argue for. It is a way to deliver priorities that are already on the table. The full institutional picture is in the regional systems brief.

Strand	Commitment it delivers	What that unlocks
SEL	Conference emphasis on social and emotional learning and wellbeing; CESA focus on holistic skills.	A concrete SEL curriculum ministries can point to, not just a policy line.
Literacy & numeracy	FLN as the headline conference priority; national foundational-learning targets and the push for a common minimum.	Comparable foundational-outcome data across pilot districts in four countries.
Unplugged coding	Digital-skills and 21st-century-competency commitments, framed for classrooms with no devices or power.	A credible entry point to digital literacy that works in the lowest-resource schools.
Robotics	STEM and innovation goals; the shift from consuming technology to building it.	A shared-kit model that keeps per-school cost low while reaching hands-on learning.
Play	Repeated conference call for playful, child-centred, activity-based pedagogy.	One teacher-training pathway that carries all four strands.
Parent role	Parental-engagement commitment across the conference.	Take-home play prompts and a termly community showcase built into every strand.

How a pilot runs

A cluster, a term, and a clear before-and-after

SELution runs inside the existing school system, not as a parallel structure. One pilot is roughly one district cluster for one to two terms.

Cluster and baseline

An implementing partner selects 8 to 15 schools in one district. A short play-based assessment gives a foundational-skills and SEL baseline for a sample of classes.

Train the trainers, then the teachers

A cascade: SELution trains a small group of national master trainers, who train district facilitators, who run the hands-on teacher training and fortnightly coaching. It is how a programme reaches many classrooms quickly without thinning out.

Run the strands

Teachers run 3 to 4 short sessions a week using the scripts and low-cost materials. Robotics kits rotate between schools on a fixed schedule.

Engage parents

Weekly take-home play prompts in the local language and a termly showcase where children demonstrate what they built and learned.

Measure and report

The per-child records roll up to a cluster dashboard. An endline repeats the baseline. Partner and ministry get one comparable report.

Decide on scale

Ministry, partner and funder review the evidence against an agreed threshold and decide whether to extend to the next cluster. The district facilitators stay on as a regional community of practice that carries the next round.

Materials are deliberately cheap and local: bottle caps, cards, chalk grids, recycled parts, one shared robotics kit per cluster. The expensive input is teacher coaching, and that is where the model concentrates spend.

Where this is

Early, honest, and already moving

SELution is at the design and partnership stage. There is a defined programme, an implementing partner in conversation, and interested contacts in four countries. There is no funded pilot yet. That is the ask.

Implementing partner

NIA Kenya

Neighbours Initiative Alliance, a Kajiado-based NGO rooted in pastoralist communities since 1996, in conversation about hosting a first pilot in the schools it works alongside.

Interested contacts

4 countries

Educators and organisations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Sudan.

Grounding

Post-conference

Built on the 2nd EAC Regional Education Conference agenda, with the systems brief as reference.

Status

Seeking pilot funding

One or two district clusters, one to two terms, with baseline and endline.

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