The Role of Kilimani Sesame in the Healthy Development of Tanzanian Preschool Children

This article, available for purchase only, describes research on Kilimani Sesame, a media intervention that employs print, radio, and television, as well as mediation and activities by adult teachers, to entertain and educate preschool children in Tanzania. Kilimani Sesame includes a special focus on malaria education, general health, and HIV, as well as content on literacy, mathematics, and socio-emotional skills.

Sesame Workshop commissioned the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, who worked in association with a 10-person Tanzanian research team, to carry out a 6-week intervention delivering Kilimani Sesame material to 223 children in the rural district of Kisarawe and the city of Dar es Salaam. The researchers randomly assigned children to groups that received either low or high exposure. The study examined children's pre- and post-exposure performance on a series of tests designed to measure outcomes related to educational messages presented in the programme.

Results offer evidence that literacy and numeracy, social and emotional development, and health and hygiene significantly improved from baseline to post-intervention; those with the greatest receptivity to Kilimani Sesame performed the best after the intervention, controlling for baseline scores, sex, age, location, and general media receptivity. Specifically:

• Children's knowledge about malaria prevention and transmission improved after exposure to Kilimani Sesame; children with greater exposure gained more.
• Children's general health knowledge improved after exposure to Kilimani Sesame; those with greater exposure gained more. This measure included, for instance, children's recognition of a medical provider, awareness of healthy foods and behaviours, and knowledge of what to do when ill or in an emergency situation.
• Children's malaria knowledge, general health knowledge, and health behaviours improved after exposure to Kilimani Sesame (measured by character identification). Children who could name more characters correctly after the intervention showed greater gains across these outcomes than those who could name fewer, even after controlling for their baseline performance on these outcomes, baseline character identification, and other factors.
• Children's knowledge about HIV/AIDS and their attitudes towards people with HIV/AIDS also improved significantly after exposure to Kilimani Sesame (measured by character identification); children who could name more characters correctly after the intervention improved more on their knowledge about HIV/AIDS and their HIV/AIDS attitudes compared to those who could name fewer, even after controlling for baseline knowledge/attitudes and other factors.

This study shows that an educational media intervention directed towards very young children can have an impact on their healthy development, even in locales where populations have minimal resources and face extreme hardships.

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