South Africa is at a crossroads. Time is running out for achieving our development goals. With less than five years to the 2030 National Development Plan and SDG deadlines, South Africa is not on track to achieve its SDG 4 Early Childhood Development goals, and in consequence, its broader human capital goals.
This means that, in the longer term, the country risks failing to achieve its longer-term inclusive development goals set out in Africa’s Agenda 2063. To achieve the country’s development goals, all young children must develop their full potential, as this lays the foundation for lifelong outcomes and is key to breaking intergenerational patterns of exclusion, thus transforming society to end inequality and poverty. Universalising ECD to achieve transformation depends on achieving the SDG 4.2 targets.
This means ensuring that every child, especially the most marginalised, has access to quality ECD programmes to improve their development outcomes and ensure they are on track for successful learning. Despite having taken several progressive steps over the past decade, including the adoption of a national ECD policy, making ECD an apex priority as far back as 2010, pursuing an ECD massification programme, adopting a developmental approach to ECD centre registration, providing an ECD subsidy for children in poverty, and most recently allocating an additional R 10 billion to improve access and ECD infrastructure, South Africa has a long way to go to achieve its SDG 4.2 targets. The most recent statistics show that more than 1.15 million children (68,4%) aged 3-5 years are not in ECD centres.
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This represents a negligible increase in the proportion of children in this age group with access, from 67% in 2016. According to the 2021 ECD census, only 40% are registered and thus eligible to access the ECD subsidy and the means to maintain safe infrastructure, nutrition, and quality provisioning. Historically marginalised young children remain at a much higher risk of exclusion because of the non-availability of centres and the high cost of attendance, and there is significant and persisting inequality in the quality of early learning and care provided.
In consequence, in 2024, the majority of young children are not developmentally on track, and disadvantaged children are disproportionately represented in this group. TheThrive by Five Index report (2024)confirms that only 42% of children in ECD centres are on track for learning, meaning 58% are not. The situation is even more dire for children who are not in ECD centres.
Of the group assessed, only 18% were on track. An estimated 115,000 new ECD centres must be built to meet the demand for places. In addition, registration must be accelerated, and quality increased and standardised to ensure that all children have an equal opportunity to develop.
To address these massive gaps, there must be a significant, rapid scaling up of larger ECD centres to meet demand, and this must be done in a manner that ensures consistency and uniformity in quality. In addition, all unregistered centres must be identified and supported to comply with legislated norms and standards overseen by local and provincial governments so that they can access the subsidy. The Government has developed the Bana Pele programme to support registration, and R10 billion has been allocated to increase the subsidy amount and to cover the cost of new builds and improvements to existing infrastructure. In addition, the DBE’s 2030 Strategy for ECD anticipates further collaborative initiatives, facilitated through a social compact between government, non-government and business role players to contribute additional resources to supplement these initiatives.
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