Baytna [بيتنا]: Early Childhood Care

Families on the move face enormous challenges and long periods of stress and uncertainty which can cause chronic anxiety and toxic stress. For young children, traumatic events have severe impacts on both physical and mental health that can affect them over the course of a lifetime.

Baytna, or ‘our home’ in Arabic, is designed to help refugees overcome the trauma they may have suffered through their lives. It provides families with key emotional support alongside high quality early childhood care and development (ECCD), to support physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development. The spaces we create are safe and positive, so children feel relaxed, happy and confident, and caregivers get essential respite and space to process trauma and difficult experiences. 

Since its launch in 2016, Baytna has supported over 800 children and their parents. In June 2019, along with our partnersChoose Love and with additional support from the Open Society Foundations, we launched Baytna Hubs, a capacity-building programme to help local partners adopt Baytna for their particular contexts, adapting the delivery while retaining fidelity to the Baytna Principles, and to our shared values.