PlayLab
A radical experiment in one district: inviting parents to rediscover play, and in doing so, reimagining who is responsible for a child's earliest years. Eight weeks. Nearly 600 caregivers. One question: if play could transform Sujawal, what could it do across Pakistan?
Programme Design, SBC Strategy & Community Co-Design
White Rice led the full design of Pakistan's first PlayLab for Parents, from the initial concept inspired by BRAC's globally validated model to its contextualisation for Sujawal's specific social norms, literacy levels, and community rhythms. This encompassed SBC strategy, session curriculum design, Play Champion training systems, WhatsApp monitoring architecture, community ritual design including the PlayMela, and the complete documentation required for replication and national scale.
Key Outcomes
The Challenge
In Pakistan, play is dismissed, not for children, but for parents. Across communities like Sujawal, where poverty is structural, literacy is low, and social norms run deep, the idea that a parent should sit on the floor and make toys out of mud is not just unfamiliar. It is seen as wasteful, or beneath the dignity of a working father, or simply not something the community does.
Yet the science is unambiguous. The first eight years determine cognitive development, emotional health, and educational outcomes for decades to come. Those years are shaped not by classrooms or curricula, they are shaped by responsive caregiving and play. The parent who stops to respond, to build together, to talk through a story, this is who determines a child's developmental trajectory.
Existing ECD programmes in Pakistan were child-facing, not parent-facing. They were lecture-based, literacy-dependent, and targeted mothers in isolation. Fathers, the gatekeepers of social permission in most households, were absent from the conversation entirely. What White Rice was asked to design was something genuinely different: a programme that would make play feel important, not just sound important, in a community where neither the infrastructure nor the social permission for playful caregiving existed.
In Sujawal, play was dismissed as 'timepass.' Fathers were absent from caregiving. Toys were seen as luxuries. And mothers were overburdened and unsupported. The challenge was not information. It was norms.
The Strategy
White Rice drew on BRAC's globally validated PlayLab model, which had demonstrated 5x greater developmental gains for PlayLab children over peers in a two-year Bangladesh study, and systematically redesigned it for Sujawal's specific social, cultural, and literacy context. Four strategic pillars shaped every design decision.
The Intervention
The PlayLab unfolded across six sequential phases, each building on the last, from community trust-building through to a village-wide celebration that anchored the norm change in public life and community memory.
Session Rhythm
Six design features made PlayLab structurally distinct from every conventional parenting programme, each one targeting a specific barrier that had made previous interventions fall short.
Before, I thought this was only the mother's responsibility. Now I feel I'm part of this journey too.
Three things had to shift at once:
what play means, who plays, and where it happens.
“We used to scold kids for banging pots. Now we realise they were learning.”
— Mother, Sujawal · PlayLab Participant
The Impact
From Sujawal
to Pakistan.
PlayLab is not a short-term project. Its low-cost structure, everyday materials, shared community spaces, locally recruited and WhatsApp-trained Play Champions, ensures sessions can continue long after any initial funding cycle. The method itself is the intervention, and the Sujawal pilot has produced a complete replication blueprint ready for embedding into Lady Health Worker systems, government pre-school networks, and provincial ECD strategies contributing to Vision 2030 and 2040 human capital goals.
With 60 million children under eight in Pakistan, this is not a small ambition. It is a national one.
If play could transform Sujawal,
imagine what it could do across Pakistan.
The Sujawal PlayLab proved that even in contexts of poverty and low literacy, families can nurture children who are loved, stimulated, and ready to thrive. With 60 million children under eight in Pakistan, PlayLab is more than a project. It is a scalable, low-cost blueprint for responsive parenting at national scale. White Rice designed the programme. The community made it a movement.
