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To transform South African society, we must invest in our children

Hopolang Selebalo and Jon Fish Hodgson
By Hopolang Selebalo and Jon Fish Hodgson
18 Feb 2025
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The budget the government tables this week is an opportunity for wise decisions that can transform our future.

In his State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said, “Our immediate focus is to expand access to early childhood development [ECD] for every child.”

The President also emphasised that “we must do much more” to address the persistent poverty faced by women. Similarly, the ANC’s recent lekgotla statement recognised that “investing in ECD is one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of poverty and ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.”

In addition, the DA’s Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube has announced an “urgent strategic reorientation of the [basic education] system towards strengthening foundational learning”. We hope Wednesday’s budget will walk this talk.

While no single quick fix for the triple challenges of inequality, poverty and unemployment that face South Africa exists, significant investments in early learning programmes can yield a tangible triple benefit.

First, access to quality early learning programmes (ELPs) provides children with the opportunity to learn what matters and ensures their holistic development.

Second, investing in ELPs as employment stimulus pragmatically supports women’s enterprise, vocation and skills development. Third, extending early learning programmes enables wider economic participation by caregivers, who are overwhelmingly women. So early learning, employment stimulus, micro-enterprise, skills development and gender justice are reasons for, and routes to, multiply our investments in ECD.

Diamonds in the rough


About 1.3 million children aged three to five years old in South Africa are not enrolled in any form of early learning programme. Nearly half of all zero-to-five-year-olds live in rural or low infrastructure areas where lack of access is especially pronounced.

This stark divide in access is reflected in the enrolment gap: while 66% of children from the poorest households miss out on early learning, only 36% of children from wealthier families face the same exclusion.

Yet all our children, across South Africa, are born learners, who can grow into lives and livelihoods of social good – if we see and meet them, and their caregivers, where they are.

‘Quality lives here’ in home-based programmes


The early learning gap highlights the urgent need for scalable solutions that can reach children in underserved areas. As such, there is a strong case for the budget to invest in home- and community-based early learning programmes.

Research increasingly indicates that home- and community-based programmes offer the advantages of nurturing children close to their homes; that these programmes are accessible to caregivers who face erratic work, or as is often the case, work-seeking schedules, high travel costs, or other socioeconomic barriers.

Research also shows that ELP quality is not determined by the physical setting. Rather, quality depends on practitioners’ pedagogical practices with children and the relationships they build – which are enabled by a structured daily routine of play, physical activities and storytelling, as well as reasonable child-to-practitioner ratios.

Indeed, South African practice now shows that home- and community-based programmes provide safe and nurturing environments for young children where they can develop the foundational skills and relationships needed to succeed in life.

A recent second evaluation of child outcomes across the SmartStart network – a social franchise that works to close the early learning access gap and the largest of its kind across South Africa – demonstrates that children in home- and community-based programmes develop significantly. The evaluation, to be published next month, found the greatest progress for children from low-income homes and communities, which SmartStart targets.

‘Immediate, urgent’ investments can scale by 2030


Crucially, home- and community-based ELPs continue to be established relatively quickly and easily, without the decades-long delays associated with building new infrastructure or formal qualifications (both of which are valuable, though neither necessarily guarantee positive child outcomes).

They are an affordable way to extend early learning programmes to “every child”, as the President said – by 2030, as set out in the Department of Basic Education’s first national ECD strategy. Investments in home- and community-based programmes also recognise women’s widespread existing contributions (care, effort, space, food and more), make these effective, and afford opportunities for enterprise and local economic activity. 

All of this is possible on a much broader scale if Wednesday’s budget speech invests in end-to-end delivery systems which, by design, provide the full spectrum of setup, support and quality assurance for ELPs. Crucially, these systems address the recruitment and set-up stages needed to create a pipeline of new practitioners – historically overlooked in government planning and budgeting.

Start-up funding for new ECD micro-enterprises is key


A critical element of this investment is start-up funding for new early learning programmes, especially before they are registered and are eligible to receive the ECD subsidy. The Jobs Fund’s payments of start-up stipends to new ELPs is one pathway, Social Employment Fund contributions is another and Community Works Programme funding – or other new public employment programmes – are a third.

Such investments would complement the current national mass registration drive for early learning programmes – a key step in the collective roadmap to early learning for all.

The next step would be persuading the National Treasury to increase the ECD subsidy in real terms after years of decline: currently, policy mandates that a meagre R17 per child per day is sufficient to support the cost of nutritional food, wages and other operating expenses.

Budget investments in early learning programmes via existing mechanisms and delivery systems would address the immediate needs of children and women caregivers and also lead the way in transforming the life chances of a generation at a societal scale. DM

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