Informal child development centres play crucial role – study

A study by the Housing Development Agency found informal centres had an important role to be played in early childhood development (ECD).

The 2014 study, titled A New Approach for Supporting Informal Early Childhood Development Centres, said that children in informal settlements who did not attend ECD centres were disadvantaged at a critical point in their development and that continued the cycle of poverty and exclusion.

“Though poorly capacitated and under-resourced, most informal ECD centres play an important role in informal settlements by providing basic care to young children and enabling parents or primary caregivers to work or pursue other livelihood strategies. Large numbers of young children in South Africa attend such centres,” the study said.

South Africa recognises early childhood development as one of its priorities.

In a country with nearly six million children under the age of four, only about 1.5-million children up to the age of five attend registered early childhood development centres, said Minister of Social Development Bathabile Dlamini at a symposium at the University of Fort Hare in 2016.

The National Development Plan has committed to increasing that number: four million children up to the age of three and two million aged four and five must get developmental activities by 2030.

But the Housing Development Agency said the informal centres have no relationship with government and cannot access its support and funding.

They can’t formally register with the social development department because they do not meet prescribed standards.

“There should be a willingness to work with informal

ECD centres and recognise that many are able to provide ‘acceptable informal ECD services’ even though they might not be able to achieve formal registration standards,” according to the Housing Development Agency.

ECD centres get R15 a child a day and the total conditional grant for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 financial years is R812-million.

The requirements for an ECD centre to be registered include: One toilet for every 20 children; an outdoor play area of at least one square metre per child for the first 30 children;trained teachers; a safe structure with suitably covered floors; and a sick bay away from other children.

The social development department had not responded to a request for comment at the time of going to print. the child inside the house with food and go to work,” said.

The centres provide breakfast and lunch. “Some of them tell us when they arrive in the morning that: ‘Teacher, I only eat here because there is no food at home.’ When there is enough food we give them some to take home,” she said.

In some homes the situation is dire: both parents are not working, they do not have IDs and because the children don’t have birth certificate they cannot get social grants. In some instances the parents are addicted to drugs and alcohol and use whatever money they have to feed their addiction.

“Today one of our four-year-olds is not here, and I know that his parents, who are both addicted to nyaope, have taken him to go beg at the robots.”

Mbatha said sometimes she feels like giving up but then she thinks about how the children’s lives are improved and she carries on.

“Just the other day I came across one of the kids I taught in Dlamini. He told me that he passed matric with distinctions last year. When he saw me he said: ‘My first teacher’. That warmed my heart.”