Count them in: 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.
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.
President Ramaphosa has recognised, on at least two occasions, that the Government has not adequately prioritised ECD, and this has contributed significantly to our stalled development. He committed the newly elected 7th Administration to universalising ECD in his July 2024 State of the Nation address and again at the ECD Leadership Summit in March 2025, to drive inclusive, sustainable development.
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. 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. The Thrive 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.
Breadline Africa has proactively pioneered the latter process in a community in Mpumalanga marked by declining social and economic circumstances, poor access to essential services such as health clinics, and small, unregistered ECD centres that charge fees, do not access the subsidy and provide services that range in quality from poor to very good. It has mobilised non-government and business partners to donate land and an existing building, and to commit to providing supporting services through a larger, consolidated ECD hub that will be registered, provide access to at least 200 children, and deliver quality early learning by qualified educators.
This initiative shows the enormous potential of collaborating to universalise quality ECD and build human capital for inclusive, sustainable development. However, the initiative is at risk, and the potential may remain unrealised, because the current ECD financing and institutional framework are not designed to support and enable the collaborative initiatives envisaged by the 2030 ECD strategy.
The Mpumalanga initiative has been hampered and stalled by:
- Persistently onerous local government regulations and a lack of leadership and local capacity to fulfil the developmental role mandated by the ECD policy to support ECD centres meet these requirements and provide ongoing support for the ECD hub as a local community asset.
- Lack of access to provincial and local government funds to augment the resources to improve and maintain the ECD hub infrastructure.
The G20 summit and the delivery of the Medium-Term budget are now past us. It is essential that the Government, which holds the G20 Presidency and has committed to ensure it serves as a platform to highlight development impediments and has committed to prioritise the use of public resources to build human capital, use these platforms to provide leadership and address the local government and funding model limitations that stand in the way of collaborative efforts to universalise quality ECD.
Specifically, Breadline Africa calls on the Government to remind all G20 leaders of the commitment made in 2018 to invest in ECD, of the limited gains made since then in universalising ECD in South Africa and the wider region, of the promise made in 2024 at the UN Summit of the Future to invest in children’s development and to use the G20 platform to mobilise leadership and resources to fulfil this commitment, and to call on them to recommit to the strategic use of public resources to universalise quality ECD.
Further, Breadline Africa calls on the Minister of Finance and Parliament to execute this commitment in the upcoming Medium-Term Budget policy statement by:
- Identifying universal ECD as a national funding priority
- Directing that provinces use the ECD grant to fund infrastructure that is the result of a social compact, improves access to large numbers of children, and guarantees quality provisioning
- Directing local governments to use the Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) to fund local ECD infrastructure development and maintenance, and to ring fence a portion of the MIG to secure its use as directed.
Lene Øverland and Warren Povey – from Breadline Africa. Patricia Martin-Wiesner, is a director at Advocacy Aid