The recent COVID-19 global health pandemic has significantly impacted on communities around the world. This webinar shares learning from our multi-country project UKRI GCRF “Safe, Inclusive Participative Pedagogy: Improving Early Childhood Education in Fragile Contexts” on how women and children in communities in Brazil, Eswatini, Palestine and South Africa have experienced the effects of the pandemic disproportionately due to historical marginalisation based on politics, poverty, racism and colonialism.

The project is coordinated by professor Kay Tisdall at the the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and in Brazil by professor Irene Rizzini at CIESPI/PUC-Rio. The aim is to contribute to debates and actions about children and their families in two communities: Rocinha (Rio de Janeiro) and Jardim Catarina (São Gonçalo), both in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The focus is to develop partnerships to improve the state of Early Childhood Education.

Among such communities, women and young children are a particularly overlooked group whose experiences of disadvantage and inequalities have been exacerbated and deepened throughout the pandemic. Our webinar critically examines notions of ‘fragility’ or ‘vulnerability’ against the backdrop of historical and systemic oppression and marginalisation of some communities, by sharing stories of struggles, agency, resistance, hope and activism of women and young children.

The webinar will be in English.

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