Social Development

South Africa’s children are in danger

24 August 2010

This is an extract from an article written by Leonard Saul, the chief executive of the South African Congress for Early Childhood Development, for the Mail & Guardian, published online on 24 August 2010.

Early childhood development (ECD) is the term used by the South African government to encompass all services provided to children from birth to nine years old.

Children of this age group are provided for in many different settings, from playgroup to workplace, nursery to public school, and at home- and community-based sites. The settings vary but children have in common a need to learn. During that period they are at the most impressionable stage of their development and what they learn will be with them for the rest of their lives.

A good care and education programme offers children, parents and the teachers who work with them the shared joy of being involved in young children’s learning. The experience can last for life because it aims to build on the interests, achievements and experiences of the individual child and his or her family.

But only a minority of South Africa’s children are enrolled in any such programmes. The education department’s Nationwide Audit of ECD Provisioning in 2000 showed there were 103 0473 learners enrolled at 24 482 ECD sites and they were cared for by 54 503 teachers. That is, less than one-sixth of seven million children in the nought to seven age group were in some sort of ECD provisioning.

The finances of these sites are not strong and viable. About 30% charge fees of less than R100 a month and at nearly half the sites fees are not paid regularly.

The sector faces even more challenges. ECD practitioners are still in the dark about the practicalities entailed in the Children’s Act, released in September 2009 and launched in Atteridgeville in May this year. The department of social development held information sessions before the Act was amended, but it needs to do more. A user-friendly version of the most important areas of the Act should be distributed to all ECD practitioners.

It is hoped the department’s intention to streamline the work of Setas will ensure that the capacity of NGOs and other organisations will be enhanced. Private training providers will remain with the current Education, Training and Development Practices Seta, to be renamed the Education Training Skills Development Seta.

But financial concerns remain pressing. From April this year the department of social development decreased the number of subsidies paid for a child a day to all centres nationally. This is very disturbing: it impacts on the ability of an ECD centre to respond to the physical and educational needs of the child.

Victor Modiba, a capital projects consultant to Tshikululu Social Investments, says: “South Africa, as a developing economy, needs to start responding to the pressures of being a global player by producing the highest levels of quality in education and health as one of its primary objectives.”

Our children dare not go the route of having to be impoverished now to suffer hardship in the future. If South Africa hopes to improve its educational system and have matric results that empower learners to be competent for the changing economic and global environment, ECD must once more be prioritised as the foundation and bedrock of our society.

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