To achieve our various goals, our programme is 3-fold:
Early Childhood Nutrition & WASH
Children all over the world have the same potential for growth and cognitive development in early childhood. The nutrition necessary to realize this common potential is a birth right of every child. Children aged 0-5 years are the group worst affected by malnutrition in South Africa. Stunting, which results from poor nutrition and disease, affects over a quarter of children under five. Stunted children are unjustly deprived, not only in terms of reaching their full growth potential, but more importantly, of achieving their full cognitive potential.
Stunted children start Primary School with reduced capacity for learning and processing new information. The impairment to brain development caused by stunting in early childhood persists later into life. There is a comprehensive body of research showing that children stunted at the age of 2 years are severely disadvantaged in terms of their learning ability for the rest of their lives. They tend to start school later, perform worse on tests for reading and intelligence, achieve lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school than their non-stunted counterparts. In adulthood, they tend to live in poorer households, attain lower occupational status, earn less, and suffer higher rates of diabetes and obesity.
We are adding to their chances to survive, develop and thrive. We are giving the children on our nutrition and education programme a chance to start their Primary School education as well prepared, physically fit children.
- Zero2Five provides over 800 unfunded and under-resourced Early Childhood Development Centres in marginalized communities with highly nutritious meals, nutrition & WASH training programmes for teachers and ongoing monitoring and mentoring;
- We implement large-scale GMP (Growth Monitoring and Promotion) campaigns and measure the growth and development in sample ECD centres to monitor our nutrition programme
Play & Learn
Education plays a fundamental role in community development as it provides a set of basic skills for development, creativity and innovative abilities within individuals. The South African Constitution states that everyone has a right to education. We have continued ECD practitioner training and mentoring for our core, resource-based early learning programmes Wordworks ‘Every Word Counts’ and ‘Little Stars’ and LEGO Duplo Play Box. We integrate the isiXhosa / isiZulu programme and resources into our work with ECD practitioners, providing practical ideas for supporting the development of early language and literacy. This programme is well supported with super resources developed by our partners in early literacy, Biblionef and Book Dash. Our education wizard friends from Biblionef are adding the most valuable ECD Resources boxes with innovative, hands-on educational toys to this program for indoor as well as outdoor activities.
Our much-valued partner Care for Education enabled us to further scale up our second and much enjoyed resource program, the Lego Duplo Play Box. Each Play Box contains a variety of elements which are valuable as teaching and learning tools in any curriculum, from early childhood to adulthood. A Play Box provides opportunities for activities which promote skills development and learning through play. DUPLO can be used to support a wide range of early learning domains. A lot of time is spent playing and practicing DUPLO activities that help children to understand direction, location, spaces, shapes, colours, numbers, quantity, sequence, dimension, size and similarities, differences and much more.
Our key differentiator is the extensive and ongoing mentoring and training provided by our team in the field to ensure each ECD practitioner’s success. Many people in our rural community lack the knowledge and skills necessary to compete for jobs in urban areas, have little to know tertiary education and suffer from feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. Our training model places heavy emphasis on self-development, global perspective and confidence building, as well as the practical side of early learning.
ECD Registration and Capacity Building
We assist the ECD practitioners in facilitating necessary changes required in order to register with the Department of Education by introducing them to the compliance requirements and application process. Our pack contains all the information and guidance on the required documentation that ECD centres need when applying for partial care registration. It guides applicants through filling in forms, as well as collecting supporting documentation. Most of these centres are situated in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, South Africa.
The ECD Function Shift from Department of Social Development (DSD) to the Department of Basic Education (DBE) took place on 1 April 2022. We have been busy supporting National DSD in partnership with Nelson Mandela Foundation and Impande South Africa to roll out the Vangasali campaign seeking to find and register every ECD service in the country. This is an exciting opportunity to embed all the learning and work we have been doing on ECD registration over the past 4 years in all the districts we serve. We work closely with the district offices of the DBE to limit the service delivery interruptions to ECD services and to ensure that the sector continues to grow in government support. Ultimately, it can only be Government support to ECD centres that ensures sustainability and child protection on a large scale.
We take great pride in having assisted over 150 unfunded ECD centres through the registration and subsidy application process since 2018. In the period July 2021- June 2022, Eight (8) rural ECD centres in the uThukela District have successfully registered, four (4) of which started receiving the conditional grant. In the King Cetshwayo District, fifteen (15) of the rural ECD sites we assisted in the process have successfully registered and eight (8) of the centres are now conditionally funded.