Parents and community agency in early childhood education and development in rural Ghana: towards an indigenous home-based early learning model

Introduction This study addresses a critical gap in Ghana's efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2 by exploring how indigenous, play-oriented pedagogies support children's holistic development across 12 rural communities in northern and southern Ghana. Despite Ghana's early childhood education (ECE) policy, which emphasises scaling evidence-based best practices to strengthen the capacity of parents and communities to deliver ECE, scalable culturally grounded practices remain underexplored. Implications The findings reinforce the roles of families and communities as co-creators of culturally responsive, play-based pedagogies. The study underscores the need for ECE policies and curricula to integrate community-led indigenous pedagogies, ensuring that formal systems are enriched rather than disconnected from the sociocultural contexts in which children develop and learn. Methods Using a heterogeneous sample, the study engaged parents, community members, and traditional leaders through individual face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions. Results Thematic analysis revealed that parents, primarily mothers, creatively use locally available materials and indigenous resources to facilitate traditional games and storytelling, embedding early literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, and emotion regulation in everyday play. Fathers highlighted indigenous play as a means of strengthening parent-child bonds, fostering emotional intelligence, and creating safe spaces for emotional expression. These practices, informed by prior volunteer play-based teaching experiences, demonstrate a dynamic interplay between local knowledge and broader ECE goals.