Early childhood education eVaka being developed in cooperation with four large cities

The 4pack formed by the cities of Espoo, Oulu, Tampere and Turku will jointly continue to develop the eVaka early childhood education management system starting from 2022. A preliminary agreement signed on 15^th March details the joint development work by the cities. The 4pack cooperation of the cities includes the management, maintenance, and development of the core of the eVaka software product into a system that will meet the needs of the municipalities and improve interaction with clients.

From the very beginning, eVaka’s functionalities have been developed with a clear focus on the needs of municipal early childhood education. All four municipalities have participated in the conceptualisation of eVaka. The purpose of the system is to facilitate, among other things, the exchange of information about the child between the home and, for example, a day-care centre, i.e. early childhood education, to digitalise the review of the early childhood education plan and to provide real-time information about the time the child spends in early childhood education.

eVaka is already used in Espoo and the development of Tampere’s implementation treVaka has started in January 2021. eVaka’s functionalities and treVaka are being developed with the Ministry of Finance’s incentive scheme for digitalisation and led by the cities of Espoo and Tampere until the end of 2021.

The eVaka system is suitable for all Finnish municipalities wishing to improve the interaction between the home and early childhood education. The aim is to develop an open software product meeting the needs of all municipalities in view of early childhood education. Since eVaka has been developed with an open source code, it is freely accessible to anyone interested.

With the 4pack arrangement, Espoo considers that the critical number of user organisations has been surpassed and the number of eVaka user organisations will increase strongly in the coming years. The development of eVaka is being communicated to municipal operators at presentation events organised every couple of months, on the basis of which a population base covering approximately three million municipal residents has become interested in the system. More information and invitations to the presentation events are available from the project manager.