ECD (0-4) &
Special Employment Programmes
Presentation to
“Early Childhood Development in Action: Implementation of Quality Care,
Development and Education for Young Children”
Technical workshop of the Africa ECCD Initiative
Cape Town, July 26 – 28, 2010
Dr. Miriam Altman
Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth
HSRC
July 26, 2010
Background
• Although SA is middle income country – now with
strong state resources
• High inequality, unemployment, and community
marginalisation
• Exclusion was policy goal. Social policies racially
distinct
• On entry to new govt, aid funding channelled
through the state and community services
weakened
• Growing recognition of need to strengthen ECD
support and commitment to rolling out
Motivation
• Identified service delivery gap in child development
• Until early 2000s, early child development no-one’s responsibility
• Child development indicators reflect this neglect
• Recognition of role ECD services can play in improving child
indicators
• Enable children from poor families to start on similar footing to
resourced families
• Identified ECD (0-4) as extremely large potential
employer.
• Context of extremely high unemployment, especially amongst
women
• Potential to create up to 345,000 jobs, but at cost of about R 7
billion by 2009. (not incl ancilliary workers)
SA service delivery targets
• The National Integrated Plan for Early Childhood
Development in SA 2005 – 2010 (2005) identified a critical
challenge of reaching 2.6 million children by 2010: (50% of
children 0-4 years)
 16-20 % children to be reached through formal sites (e.g.
creches, ECD centres etc)
 30 % children to be reached through community based
programmes (e.g. IMCI, Grants, PMTCT, playgroups
etc.)
 50 % children to be reached through services directly
targeting the household (e.g. birth registration,
protection, hygiene, psychosocial care and support etc.)
What do we mean by
Early Childhood Development (ECD) Services?
• It goes beyond creches, day care centres and
preschools.
• It includes all services for children 0-4 years
including health care, grants, nutrition, access social
grants, mental development, social development
• programmes such as child minding, home visiting,
parent education, play projects, cognitive
development and health programmes
• ECD services are inherently delivered in networks
What does scaling up ECD mean?

Increase the numbers of children who are
benefiting from ECD
 Increase the different types of services
children 0-4 can get.
 Improve the quality and sustainability of ECD
services
Current scale of ECD (0-4) service delivery
•
On ECD, the statistics shows that:
• 51% of children have some external supervision support
• Approx ½ are with day mother or grandmother
• In 2008, approx 1.3 m children (26% of the cohort age 0-4) are enrolled
in ECD
– Up from 8% in 2002 and 17% in 2006
• Very small % receive state support. Other sources of funding in poor
communities very limited. Often depend on grant recipients.
•
On other programmes:
• Wide coverage of a child support grant, although 0-2 still a challenge
• Birth registration coverage was 25% in 1998 and 72% in 2005
• In 2006, 84% of children under one received primary vaccines
• Vit A distribution, reaches 20% of target
State support for ECD (0-4)
• The government provides an subsidy to ECD
centres through the provinces.
• Delivered by non-profit organisations, who
apply on a per-head basis
• In 2007, 10% (approx 300,000) of poor
children in a centre subsidised by the state
• Substantial variation by province – eg eastern
cape = 3% coverage, vs western cape = 23%
ECD delivery through home
community care
• Home community care meant to be the main approach
to delivery
• Still not defined, and therefore difficult to support
• Having done some investigation, we believe the
service can be defined as a network
• Locus of support is the service organisation that links
households to services
• This approach to delivery can especially make sense in
reaching marginalised communities
Challenge of state involvement
• Scaling up using state resources adds a
challenge
• Care for vulnerable or ‘voiceless’ carries risk
when done at scale
• State is accountable
• Lowest immediate risk approach for state is to
let families do it themselves
• However longer term risk of poor human
development
State & CBOs fundamentally different
• State is large, lumbering bureaucracy that is
understandably rule bound.
• Interest is in a birds eye view of social delivery that
needs to reach large numbers of people
• Many CBOs are more precarious, and are not rule bound.
• Interest is in delivering to the community around them
• Reaching smaller numbers at any time, with more
flexibility
• Esp in ECD services, supporting institutions may not
currently be strong enough to enable kind of scaling up
sought – unlike many other sectors that are more
formalised.
Expansion and sustainability of
employment
• Human resources contribute the majority of
the cost in ECD services, whether in centres
or home community networks = about 70 to
90% of all costs
• In SA, we have linked public works
programmes to community based delivery of
social services.
• Dilemma = job creation for marginalised or job
creation for service delivery?
Potential approach to be tested
• Public works(phase 2) (or EPWP II) introduced:
• Employment Incentive
• Subsidises continuous employment in non-profit
organisations that can show employment expansion
• Subsidy is valued at about R 1000 per month
• Similar to earning of domestic worker or informal sector worker
• Substantially more than what is currently earned in ECD and is
stable.
• Organisation can top-up if able to do so
 Community Works Programme
 working at ward level which guarantees 1-2 days work per week in
activities defined by the community
Matching opportunities
• EPWP Employment Incentive funds stable employment
• ECD subsidy through province funds inputs and service
matching such as birth registration, immunisation,
stimulation, nutrition, vitamin A, practitioner and parent
skills development, etc. This must be defined so that
funding can be made available.
• National commitment to expanding further education
and training enrolments, which is level of ECD training
• Significant funding available in the National Skills Fund