Peer-reviewed article
Scaling the Moments That Matter® early childhood development model: how communities’ monitoring for change contributes to sustainable impact
Dawn E. Murdock, Kelvin Munsongo, George Nyamor ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001The Moments That Matter program is a faith-based early childhood development initiative that empowers caregivers of children under three across Zambia and Kenya. The program uses a community-led monitoring and evaluation system where parents, local leaders, and volunteers set their own goals and track progress together. The approach enables communities to eventually run the program independently and then help expand services to new underserved areas. The paper examines how this community-centered model achieves sustainable impact and enables scaling across multiple countries.
Key points
- MTM has reached approximately 60,000 children under three since 2012 across six countries, starting in Zambia and expanding to Kenya and beyond
- The community-led MEL system is people-centered with all stakeholders—community leaders, service providers, volunteers, and caregivers—setting their own goals and participating in monitoring
- Communities graduate to independent ownership after two program cycles and then identify new vulnerable caregivers to reach, enabling program expansion without additional external staff
- Scaling occurs through two channels: establishing MTM in new marginalized rural areas as communities achieve ownership, and deepening reach within existing communities as they take full responsibility
- Success depends on three critical factors: embedding community MEL from project start, providing capacity-building and tailored tools, and fostering collaboration between ECD Committees, trained promoters, and Primary Caregivers
Limitations
This is a case study examining how the community-led MEL system functions; it does not present quantified outcomes or impact measurements for child development outcomes, nor does it include comparison with other early childhood programs. The paper focuses on implementation processes rather than rigorous evaluation of program effectiveness on child well-being indicators.
Abstract
This paper presents a community case study of how the Moments That Matter ® (MTM) Program community-led monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system contributes to a scalable model with quality and sustainable impact. With a faith-based approach, MTM is an early childhood development program partnership of Episcopal Relief & Development which is rooted in parenting empowerment and community ownership. MTM empowers Primary Caregivers, strengthening nurturing care of some 60,000 children aged under three since 2012. Launched in Zambia, MTM has expanded to five other countries. Based on MTM Zambia and Kenya, this paper examines how an innovative, community-led MEL system functions to drive sustainable impacts and scaling. Measurement for change has been critical to the community MEL system. MTM is people-centered with community leaders, early childhood development service providers, volunteers and Primary Caregivers all setting their specific goals. The program is inclusive with all stakeholders engaged in monitoring and making adjustments; interactive with relationship-based social and behavior change strategies; informative with continuous data gathering used for decisions and problem-solving; and dynamic with built-in flexibility and an adaptation process. The community-led MEL propels scaling up through two channels: (1) New communities for MTM program start up: As MTM communities graduate to community ownership, program staff and budget are then invested in new marginalized and underserved rural areas. (2) Deepening reach within MTM communities: Over the first two cycles, communities transition to community ownership, then continue independently of staff and budget. They identify a new set of vulnerable Primary Caregivers of children under three and carry out the caregiver parenting support and learning activities. The success of the program’s community-led MEL in achieving sustainable change and fueling the program scale up hinges on three factors: (1) Initiating the community-led MEL dimension at project start, gradually increasing the community role while reducing the staff role. (2) Provision of Community MEL capacity-building and effective, user-friendly tools to be tailored locally. (3) Three program stakeholder types leading MEL and collaborating closely with each other: ECD Committees with MTM-trained faith leaders, ECD Promoters, and Primary Caregivers of children under three.