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The Global Parenting Initiative (GPI) aims to improve child development and prevent child sexual abuse by bringing playful parenting and learning through play to a large scale.
By 2026, the GPI aims to provide 25.7 million families with evidence-based human-digital playful parenting support, with the ultimate goal of reaching 250 million children by 2030.
The GPI works with partners and families and is committed to core principles that inform their work. We utilise tools and resources developed by Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH), a global social enterprise at the forefront of a global movement to accelerate the scale-up of evidence-based, freely-available, inclusive, and culturally-sensitive parenting solutions within existing systems of delivery.
Below are the GPI’s key focus areas.
The GPI conducts innovative and rigorous research to increase the evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and scalability of PLH’s human-digital playful parenting programmes.
The research aims to rapidly advance knowledge on how human-digital playful parenting support can best help children realise their learning potential.
Our worldwide studies are led or co-led by senior and early career researchers from the Global South.
The GPI develops accessible and agile parenting support delivery technologies, such as ParentText, ParentChat, and ParentApp, that can be easily transported and contextualised to meet the needs of local implementing partners.
The building blocks of the PLH parenting digital tools are simple to use, and content can easily be adapted and edited to fit local contexts. The GPI platform also provides a field-testing site.
GPI’s innovation work is led by IDEMS – a social enterprise that collaborates with innovative expert researchers and local communities around the world to develop pioneering digital interventions and infrastructure designed to work in – and scale across – low-resource contexts for responsible, sustainable global impact.
The Global Parenting Initiative (GPI) facilitates the creation of centres of excellence in playful parenting in the Global South. It also supports a shift in expertise, leadership, and power from the Global North to the Global South.
This is achieved through strategically facilitated capacity sharing, including building learning communities, hosting learning events and driving communities of practice.
The GPI Future Leaders Programme supports early career researchers, particularly those from the Global South, through training, mentorship, and networking.
GPI’s advocacy activities aim to shape the global parenting agenda at both global and local levels. At the global level, the GPI maintains its core advocacy role in the inter-agency Global Initiative to Support Parents (GISP) and works tirelessly with global agencies such as UNICEF and the WHO to advocate for every parent everywhere.
The GPI advocacy team works closely with local research teams to strategically respond to specific advocacy needs withing their countries and communities.
The GPI supports strategic scaling projects to scale up human-digital playful parenting programmes and embed them into national governments and existing service delivery systems.
Scale-up occurs in multiple countries and are supported by GPI’s core team to support local adaptation and implementation.
The GPI works to build a sustainable organisational infrastructure that can connect the PLH network, integrate solutions, and fuel innovation to develop delivery models for parenting programmes in the Global South.