Swazi Observer

FULL STORY

EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT MUST REMAIN A PRIORITY IN REVISED 2025 BUDGET

By Daily Maverick | 2025-03-06

After more than a decade of austerity, the ill-fated 19 February Budget’s R10-billion allocation to expand access to early childhood development (ECD) services represented a much-needed shift towards prioritising South Africa’s most vulnerable. Now there is a real risk that this crucial spending commitment could be lost or diluted.

Quality ECD is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty
In the early years of life, children need a safe and stimulating environment that supports their physical, emotional, and cognitive development. Quality ECD services provide children with access to nutritious food, good healthcare, clean water, responsive care and age-appropriate learning experiences. This holistic approach provides the foundation for lifelong learning, wellbeing, and future success.

However, in South Africa many children are denied this essential foundation. Seven out of 10 children live below the upper-bound poverty line in households that are forced to make impossible trade-offs between food, electricity, transport, housing, and care. In 2022, 840,000 of these children suffered from hunger, while 1.8 million consumed a poor-quality diet. One in four children is stunted (low height for age) by age five, a stark indicator of the impact of poverty on child development.

Compounding this crisis is the lack of access to quality care and early learning programmes, with 1.15 million children aged between 3 and 5-years old having no access to early learning.

Research shows that quality early learning programmes not only support better learning outcomes but also reduce repetition and dropout rates later in a child’s education journey.

With 80% of Grade 4 learners in South Africa being unable to read for meaning, it is clear that significant strides need to be made in access to quality early and foundation phase learning.

Without a solid foundation in the early years, learners are less likely to complete their matric, attend university or technical college, and ultimately face greater difficulty in securing decent work and achieving a better standard of living.

Overcoming South Africa’s wide income inequality, skills gaps, high unemployment and low-GDP growth will not be possible until every child has a decent start in life.

Investments in ECD are highly cost-effective, and long overdue
Since 1994, various social programmes have been introduced to alleviate the impact of poverty on South Africa’s children. The Child Support Grant, for example, provides R530 per month to 13 million children, and there is a wealth of evidence on its beneficial impacts for children, including reducing hunger, improving health service utilisation, and improving birth registration, despite its modest value. The National School Nutrition Programme provides meals to more than nine million school-age children and has been shown to improve attendance, concentration, and wellbeing.

Pre-school early learning programmes, unfortunately, have been left behind. Total public funding for this sector, which employs 220,000 people and is utilised by about two million children, amounts to only R4-billion per year — about 0.2% of the current government budget. As a result, the ECD sector exists in a perennial funding crisis.

About half of early learning programmes captured in the 2021 ECD Census, or 19,000 programmes, are unregistered — and unable to benefit from the ECD subsidy intended to support access to early learning for disadvantaged children. This subsidy has been frozen at R17 per child per day for six consecutive years, eroding its value by a quarter. Most early learning programmes therefore rely on parent fees as their main source of income, limiting access for those who cannot afford to pay.

A total of 90% of the 220,000 strong workforce — primarily black women — earn below the minimum wage, meanwhile 57% of children attending early learning programmes fail to “thrive by five”, highlighting the negative impact that underfunding has on both the workforce and the children they serve.

Political commitments must translate into action
Despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s repeated commitments since 2019 to expand access to early learning programmes and invest in the care economy, funding has remained precarious.

Increasing the per-child ECD subsidy to R24 per day is essential to restore the purchasing power lost since the value was set at R17 in 2019, enabling programmes to undertake much-needed investments to better support children’s needs and improve working conditions.

Next, we need to improve access to early learning programmes for vulnerable children and ensure all eligible children accessing these programmes are subsidised. This will require an acceleration of the Bana Pele Mass Registration Drive and additional investment in ECD infrastructure, as proposed in the 19 February Budget.

Universal access to ECD
The Department of Basic Education is aiming to increase the number of subsidised children from about 750,000 currently to 1.5 million by 2027/28, and 2.3 million by 2030 — ensuring universal access to ECD for all children who need it.

To achieve this, the 12 March Budget must retain the R10-billion additional funding to ECD, so that the necessary investments in ECD subsidy, infrastructure, registration, nutrition and systems can be made.

Crucially, these and other critical social priorities must be funded through progressive revenue raising measures that improve, not worsen, our highly unequal wealth and income distribution.

We estimate that enabling universal access to early learning programmes, as outlined in the Department of Basic Education’s ambitious 2030 Strategy, would help create 70,000 care and early learning enterprises and support the creation of 300,000 new care jobs, mainly in township and rural economies. An expansion of ECD services to all children who need them could reduce childcare burdens for up to two million women, promoting their equal economic participation.

All of the political parties in the Government of National Unity (GNU) made ambitious commitments to ECD in their 2024 election manifestos. Now in government, these parties must stay the course and deliver this “key investment in the future of our country”. The rewards could be massive and align well with the GNU’s mission to create jobs and ensure inclusive economic growth. DM

share story