Meghalaya Early Childhood Development Mission (MECDM) and the Van Leer Foundation (VLF), in collaboration with ICLEI South Asia as the Technical Partner, hosted an Inception Workshop from 23–25 February 2026 under the “Technical Support unit in Meghalaya to advance first 1000 days in MECDM” project in Shillong, Meghalaya.
The project, funded by the Van Leer Foundation, aims to support the state government to strengthen state level high quality parenting programme, based on the lessons learnt from Paalan 1000 Phase-I and ongoing MECDM initiatives. It caters to the need to create an environment that supports the well-being of parents and children through inclusive Early Childhood Development (ECD) interventions, and technical assistance for implementation of cluster-level interventions using five (05) Paalan principles, i.e. Parental Wellbeing, Positive Parenting, Parenting Coaching, Responsive Caregiving, Early Stimulation in the identified project districts of East Khasi Hills and West Garo Hills.
Officials from MECDM including Chief Operation Officer Mr. Ronald Kynta and Programme Managers Health, Nutrition, Early Education & Learning, Community Mobilisation, Knowledge Management, and Civil, attended the workshop. Mr. Prakash Paul, Country Representative, and Mrs. Ashwini Godse, ECCE Expert, Van Leer Foundation, and the Technical Support Unit (TSU) under ICLEI South Asia were also present.
In this interactive workshop, participants came together to understand the objective and scope of the programme built around the five Paalan principles and identified key areas of support to MECDM based on detail discussion and deliberations involving VLF, TSU, MECDM Programme Managers along with partner organisations such as Asian Development Bank and Tattva (supporting MECDM on Super App, Monitoring Information System (MIS), Unified Data System and Chabots).
During the course of the workshop, detailed discussions were held on formative research to identify the current knowledge, attitude and practices around responsive caregiving and parental wellbeing for integration of contextual Social Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) approaches. Discussions were also held on potential SBCC tools to accommodate the different socio-economic character of the interventions, districts, geography, network connectivity challenges etc. alongside potential target audience. As a part of the workshop, the team understood and worked on the Theory of Change (ToC) for the progamme, policy framework, capacity building roadmap, and planning for its implementation.
Tattva showcased a live demo of the Super App — a digital tool designed for parents and caregivers to support the holistic development of children during the first 1,000 days of life, including its key features, components, user-friendliness, and user interface. A key highlight of the workshop was the discussion around identifying blocks within the districts where the project can be rolled out in the initial phase. Once finalised, the TSU will initiate field visits.
Following the workshop, the team got an opportunity to meet Mr. Sampath Kumar, IAS, Principal Secretary, Government of Meghalaya, and CEO, MECDM, to present the key findings and recommendations from the workshop to take things on ground moving forward.
As next steps in the programme, the team will undertake site visits for SBCC activities, identification of Infant, Toddler and their caregiver neighbourhood motivators and barriers, need assessment for Capacity Building of frontline workers and service providers, community mobilisation and site finalisation for lighthouse cluster development.
