By Lebone Rodah Mosima
Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube on Monday warned that failing to invest sufficiently in early childhood development would saddle the country with years of costly remedial work and squandered human potential, as she launched a new outcomes-based fund for early learning.
“If we miss this window, we pay for it many times over, through laborious remediation, through interventions and ultimately through lost potential,” Gwarube said at the Midrand launch.
“And while remediation has its place, nothing is more powerful, more cost-effective, or more transformative than getting it right from the start.”
The three-year fund, backed by domestic and international donors and administered in partnership with the global Education Outcomes Fund, is valued at about R496 million.
Gwarube said the initiative would help shift South Africa’s basic education system towards the earliest years of a child’s life, when interventions are most likely to change long-term outcomes.
“Science, evidence and experience tell us clearly that by the time a child turns five, the wiring that determines how they will engage with the world is largely in place,” she said.
“Between the ages of three and five, the brain is at its most malleable.
“This is when children learn to regulate their emotions, to listen, to make sense of new information, to persist through difficulty, the very skills that determine whether they will thrive in the classroom and in life.”
Early childhood care and education were a central pillar of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s seventh administration, she said.
“That is why Early Childhood Care and Education is not an add-on,” she said. “It is not a ‘nice to have.’ For the seventh administration, the foundations of learning are the backbone of a foundationally strong basic education system. It is a nation-building imperative.”
Citing the government’s 2024 Thrive by Five Index, she said the country faced deep inequalities before children even reached primary school.
“In September, we released the 2024 Thrive by Five Index, giving us a clear, data-driven picture of where our youngest citizens stand,” she said.
“Only 42% of four-year-olds in early learning programmes are developmentally on track. For children from wealthier households, the probability doubles. And for children in our poorest communities, access to quality early learning places them five months ahead of their peers even before Grade 1.
“These gaps do not close on their own. They widen. And by age 10, they shape life trajectories,” she said.
Gwarube said the government’s vision was universal access to quality early learning by 2030, “with the most vulnerable children at the centre of our efforts,” and pledged to create 1.1 million additional “safe, quality early learning spaces” over the next five years.
“Our commitment is simple and non-negotiable: by 2030, every child – not just those who can afford it or those in certain communities – must have access to safe, nurturing and high-quality early learning,” she said. “This is not aspirational. It is a national obligation.”
The new fund, designed with National Treasury and provincial governments, will use an outcomes-based financing model in which payments are linked to independently verified improvements in children’s development, rather than to inputs such as training sessions or infrastructure alone.
Working with selected non-profit providers, the programme aims to give more than 115,000 additional children access to quality early learning and provide structured support to 2,000 early learning centres to improve teaching, learning environments and developmental outcomes.
“Today we launch not just a fund, but a new way of doing things in South Africa – a way that is collaborative, accountable, outcomes-driven, and unapologetically focused on the child,” Gwarube said.
She said civil society and donors – including organisations such as the LEGO Foundation, Yellowwoods, FirstRand Foundation, the Standard Bank Tutuwa Community Foundation and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust – had “kept this sector alive when the policy environment was still catching up” and that the fund would now “honour that history and build directly on it”.
“We know that continuing on the same path will not deliver universal access,” she said. “We know the obstacles such as infrastructure, workforce development, sustainable funding. But we also know that no investment yields higher returns than the one we make in a child’s earliest years.”
Over the next three years, data from the programme will feed into wider reforms, including professionalising the early childhood workforce, redesigning funding models and expanding quality spaces across provinces, the minister said.
Chief programmes officer at the Education Outcomes Fund, Milena Castellnou, said the fund “brings together an extraordinary coalition of partners, public, private, philanthropic, and community-based actors working toward a single vision”.
The fund moved away from a focus on predetermined activities, which may or may not achieve impact, “toward a laser focus on outcomes, [which] represents a radical transformation,” she said.
“For the government of South Africa, it means ensuring that every rand invested in early childhood development translates into measurable improvements in children’s lives”.
INSIDE EDUCATION
