An essential step in convincing governments, educators, and parents of mother tongue-based bi/multilingual
education is to document—through systematic and meaningful data collection—effective policies and
practices and make these findings available to policy-makers and educators. While mother tongue-based
bi/multilingual education programmes have been established in many minority and indigenous language
communities around the world, they are far from common (Benson, 2009). Moreover, research on bi/
multilingual education for preschool-aged children is scarce. UNESCO calls for investments in pilot projects
in communities that are keen or inquisitive, including systematically documenting and evaluating these
projects using methodologically sound research.