Kumasi City Management Board × Ashanti Early Childhood Council
Family Futures Kumasi joins up creches, kindergartens, play streets and parent circles across the city — so the 1,825 days between a child’s first cry and their first classroom are full of play, checkups and stories, not gaps.
Scroll, and a paper doll toddles down the crayon path from birth to the school gate — growing as she goes. Every milestone is something Family Futures shows up for, in person, in your neighbourhood.
A birth registered in minutes, a first checkup booked before you leave the ward, and a welcome basket — cloth, a soft book, a growth card — from your neighbourhood parent circle.
Family Futures brings: bedside birth registration + welcome basketTen words, two teeth too many, and the proudest wobbly walk in the Ashanti Region. This is the year the creche door opens — with trained carers two tro-tro stops from home.
Family Futures brings: Sunrise Creche open-house weekTwo-word sentences become forty-question mornings. We meet the curiosity with free hearing and sight screening at every creche — because a child who can’t hear the story can’t love it yet.
Family Futures brings: free hearing & sight screeningKG1 enrolment opens the January after a child turns three. Bright Blocks classrooms are built on play — sand tables, story mats, blocks with Twi and English letters side by side.
Family Futures brings: guided KG1 enrolment, no queuesCounting to twenty, negotiating over crayons, telling whole stories with a beginning, a muddle and an end. Play Streets Saturdays give the whole neighbourhood a car-free stage for it.
Family Futures brings: Play Streets in six neighbourhoodsShe walks into Primary 1 knowing her letters, her numbers, and — most of all — that learning is a place where she is welcome. That confidence is the whole point of the first 1,825 days.
Family Futures brings: KG2 → P1 transition visits with her new teacherOne programme for every stage of the walk. All four run in Asokwa, Bantama, Suame, Oforikrom, Nhyiaeso and Tafo — with more neighbourhoods each year of the plan.
Neighbourhood creches within two tro-tro stops of home, staffed by trained early-years carers on the city payroll. Naps, songs, checkup days and a growth card that follows your child to KG.
Play-based KG1 and KG2 in every participating school — sand tables, story mats, and teachers retrained to teach through games in Twi and English. School readiness without the drill sergeant.
One Saturday a month, six streets close to traffic and open to chalk, kites, ampe and storytellers. Free, loud, and run with the neighbourhood — because a city that plays together grows together.
Monthly meetups of 10–15 parents with a trained facilitator — feeding, tantrums, screen time, school choices — plus optional home visits in a child’s first year. No lectures; shared wisdom and hot koko.
Cities build the places; councils know the children. Family Futures only works because both signed the same page — budget, staff and playgrounds on one side, child-development expertise on the other.
Sites, sanitation, staffing and the streets that close for play. Holds the budget line — publicly.
Curriculum, carer training, screening standards and the growth card every child carries to P1.
The partnership’s five-year plan is written as promises a parent can check: named neighbourhoods, published fee bands, screening dates on the noticeboard of every creche. If it isn’t on the board, it didn’t happen.
The parent circles wrote these together — short, practical, tested on real toddlers. Open one, screenshot it, stick it where the family will see it.
Every Sunrise site runs a settling-in fortnight each term — you stay nearby for the first three mornings.
Ten focused minutes beats two distracted hours. The dishes can watch.
Missed one? Nobody scolds. Any Sunrise site will help you catch up the same week.
Children who are read to in any language start P1 ahead. Twi counts. Twi especially counts.
Tell us about your little one and the nearest neighbourhood. A parent-circle coordinator calls within three working days — a real person, usually a parent themselves — to walk you through places, fee bands and settling-in.
Rather talk first? Come to any Play Streets Saturday and find the Family Futures gazebo. Bring the child; we’ll bring the chalk.
Concept project — adapted from a public RFQ. Frontend only; enrolment and programme listings are static UI demonstrations. This is a fictional civic presentation and is not affiliated with any real Kumasi or Ashanti institution. Programmes, neighbourhood counts and dates are plausible inventions.
Public RFQs for early-childhood initiatives keep making the same request in different words: make the first five years legible to parents. Which programme, at which age, in which neighbourhood, at what cost — answered before anyone has to queue at an office. This concept answers that brief for a fictional partnership between Kumasi’s city managers and the region’s early-childhood council.
Early-childhood services are usually communicated in the language of the institutions that fund them — policy pillars, log-frames, acronyms. Parents don’t live in pillars; they live in ages. A mother doesn’t ask “what does Outcome 2.3 deliver?” — she asks “my daughter just turned two; what should be happening right now?” The design problem was to reorganise an entire civic programme around the child’s clock instead of the institution’s org chart.
The chosen direction is a paper-cut playground: torn-paper section edges, paper tags on tape, crayon doodles, and a timeline drawn the way a five-year-old draws a road — because the audience is parents deciding whether an institution will be gentle with their child. The materials of a kindergarten wall communicate that faster than any mission statement. Discipline keeps it civic: a five-colour palette, computed contrast ratios, real information density.
Two directions were rejected. A standard NGO gradient-and-photos site — hero image of children, three pillar cards, donate button — was rejected because photography is banned by the collection’s code-drawn constraint, and because pillar-first structure recreates the exact legibility problem. A pastel dashboard aesthetic — enrolment stats, coverage maps, KPI tiles up front — was rejected because it addresses the funder, not the parent; the numbers now live further down, phrased as promises a parent can check.
prefers-reduced-motion. Nothing a parent needs is locked behind an animation.Part of a 26-site collection designed and built by Hannah Kwakye, engineered with Fable 5. Everything visible is code-drawn — no photographs, no raster images — which here meant crayon SVG doodles, a paper-doll walker, torn-paper edges, and an illustration system that had to feel hand-made while being entirely mathematical. Static hand-authored HTML, CSS and vanilla JS; two self-hosted variable fonts (Baloo 2 for display, Nunito Sans for reading); zero libraries; deployed on Netlify from a Git push.
The timeline is one SVG path in a 0 0 100 100 viewBox with preserveAspectRatio="none", stretched over a tall six-row CSS grid. Because the viewBox is percent-space, every path coordinate is a container percentage — milestone pins at y = 8.3, 25, 41.7milestone dots at land exactly on the vertical centres of the six equal grid rows, at any width, with no measurement code. y = 8.3, 25, 41.7… landhellip;vector-effect="non-scaling-stroke" keeps the crayon line the same thickness however the box stretches.
On scroll, progress t through the section maps to a distance along the path via getPointAtLength(t × L). The paper doll is an absolutely-positioned HTML element moved to that point (coordinates are already percentages — just assign them to left/top), the line “draws” behind her with the classic stroke-dasharray/dashoffset trick, and she grows — scale = 0.55 + 0.45t — from newborn to school-ready as she walks, flipping to face her direction of travel. Milestone tags pop with a spring curve when she passes their share of the path length, which the script finds by sampling 600 points and matching each pin to its nearest arc length. Under reduced motion or without JavaScript, the class that arms the popping never gets added: the full line, all six tags and the doll (placed at the school gate) are simply there.
Torn edges between sections are hand-drawn SVG paths (preserveAspectRatio="none", ~70 units tall) filled with the next section’s colour — irregular on purpose, like safety scissors. Paper tags get masking-tape strips from a single ::before rule: a translucent sun-yellow rectangle with dashed left/right borders standing in for torn tape ends. Every card carries a half-degree rotation (rotate: -1.2deg and friends) so the page never looks machine-aligned, and hover straightens cards — paper being smoothed flat.
Baloo 2 (400–800 variable, one 33 KB woff2) gives headings their rounded, crayon-adjacent voice; Nunito Sans keeps paragraphs grown-up and legible. All sizes are clamp() fluid steps. The brief’s five colours were audited with the WCAG relative-luminance formula before use: body ink was darkened from brief-plum #5C374C to #4A2C3D (11.7:1 on cloud), teal passes AA on both cloud (6.1:1) and peach (4.8:1), and sun yellow — a contrast trap on light grounds — is restricted to chips with near-black text (7.2:1), tape, and the crayon line itself.
:not(.btn).non-scaling-stroke — so the script now builds a screen-space cumulative-length table from the 600 samples and drives stroke-dashoffset from that.?success confirmation renders and takes focus.Netlify, straight from the repository: publish = ".", immutable cache headers on /assets/*, Netlify Forms handling enrolment with a honeypot and a ?success confirmation. /guide and /process exist as redirect stubs to these anchored sections, so the collection’s route contract holds on every site.