The Early Childhood Development (ECD) sector aims to capitalise on the current political goodwill towards the learning and development of young children.
Hundreds of ECD practitioners recently converged at Hebron Haven, a conference facility in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, to share ideas on how to ratchet up support for the ECD sector.
One of the conference organisers, Derek Pienaar, said while the sector is pleased that “ECD now has a major presence in the minds of leadership at both a political and a government level” what was needed was to translate this commitment into action.
During its conference in Polokwane last year, the ANC adopted resolution 29 which “makes a commitment to developing a comprehensive strategy for ECD”.
In his state of the nation address, President Thabo Mbeki also made mention of ECD as one of government’s priority areas, called Apex. Mbeki said the state would “massively speed up implementation of ECD programmes” and “would expand the number of trained staff and double the number of sites and child beneficiaries by the end of 2009”.
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel also announced in his budget speech in February that the number of sites providing ECD will grow from 487 525 to 700 000, benefiting 600 000 more children.
Minister of Education Naledi Pandor has also commissioned inquiries to establish why secondary school phase learners continue to perform badly. And the outcomes point to a weak foundation phase of education.
Pienaar said early child development is crucial as it is about nurturing children into becoming active and valuable citizens. He said although it is difficult to prove the worth of investing in early development of children, “this investment is vital to the future of our society”.
‘How we work with very young children, how they play, what they experience, their health, how they relate to parents and care-givers and even what they eat will set them up for success or failure. This determines how responsible and productive they will be as citizens.”
He said the conference also wanted to clarify the term ECD because people both in and outside the sector attach different meanings to it. “We need to use language that does not mystify the issue. ECD sounds too sophisticated and this works against children. We need to enable parents to have the confidence to use available techniques in a way that enhances the development of their children,” said Pienaar.
Pienaar said the challenge is to get all the tiers of government, including parents, to have a uniform understanding and how to secure the future of the children. Otherwise “nothing will change – regardless of how good government policy is”.
He also highlighted the problem of locating funding within the existing budgets of the three levels of government.
Instead he called for a situation where funds for ECD could be ring fenced because this gets “mixed up” or even “lost” as it is shared with other competing functions.
He said the sector would capitalise on the current prevailing positive mood to do serious advocacy work. To achieve this, they would be working closely with business and also engage top level branding agency “to help develop a strategy and craft messages that will convey the right messages to the targeted people”.