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When she noticed children hanging around with nothing to do after school in the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto in 2016, Faith Nedoboni decided to start an after-school programme. But as she helped them with their homework, she realised many, some as old as 13, were struggling to read and write.
Nedoboni, a 57-year-old single mother of three adult children, had never been a teacher. But she was an entrepreneur, first taking over her father’s restaurant and grocery store business after his death and then also selling secondhand clothes.
Last year, after Nedoboni’s eldest daughter, Sindi, 33, returned home from eight years teaching English in China, they turned Konke Academy into a preschool for children up to Grade R (age six), focusing on improving the literacy and numeracy levels that are so low in South Africa.
The country’s education problems are endemic. More than 80% of 10-year-olds cannot read for meaning, according to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. South Africa, a middle-income but highly unequal economy, ranked the lowest out of 43 countries surveyed, including several with lower incomes, such as Egypt and Iran.
Since the end of apartheid three decades ago, South Africa’s government has focused on combining its segregated school systems after the white minority government intentionally made black – “Bantu” – education worse than that for other races. It also expanded access: in 2022, almost 98% of children aged seven to 17 attended at least some school.
Now the country is focusing on early education in a bid to improve outcomes throughout childhood and beyond.
“I don’t think we have always got the issue around quality right,” says the basic education minister, Siviwe Gwarube. “Research tells us, if you don’t get literacy and numeracy right in the early years, children are unlikely ever to catch up and as a result they are unlikely to do well in more difficult subjects.”
An education bill signed in September last year added a year of compulsory schooling for five- to six-year-olds, known as Grade R.
In 2022, early learning centres, then attended by about 45% of three- to five-year-olds, were moved from the department of social development into the department of basic education. This year, the education department aims to bring 10,000 creches on to an official registry, in an effort to regulate and upgrade what are often small businesses run by female entrepreneurs such as Nedoboni in their communities.
While the government’s efforts to survey and regulate the early learning sector have been praised by experts, its policies are facing a public funding shortage and implementation challenges.
On Soweto’s eastern edge, Konke Academy is behind an unmarked gate at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in what used to be Nedoboni’s parents’ home in Diepkloof. It started with eight children but now has 28 enrolled.
Like more than 90% of early learning centres surveyed in late 2021 by the education department, Konke charges fees, in this case 600 rand (£25) a month (about a quarter of South African government schools charge fees and one-third of children attend fee-paying schools).
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“They have to start as early as possible, starting to read and even to start writing,” Nedoboni says, as the sounds of children playing echo outside. “If they can start … [aged] two identifying pictures, I think reading can be much better.”
The department of basic education taking over early learning centres was a positive step, says Carien Vorster, a regional representative of the Roger Federer Foundation in South Africa, which was set up by the retired tennis player in 2003 in his mother’s home country, and which now supports school readiness programmes in six African countries.
“It’s not to say that the department of social development didn’t do their job,” Vorster says. “I think they didn’t pay enough attention to the education element … but focused on early childhood development more from a health and social protection perspective.
“Probably, that’s the reason why we have these learning gaps and why children are not ready for school.”
Nutrition remains crucial for children’s development, though, says Zaheera Mohamed, the CEO of Ilifa Labantwana, an early childhood development NGO.
“Early learning cannot be understood in isolation,” she says. “It is starting from the point when a woman is pregnant. If she doesn’t get the right types of nutrition, she gives birth to a low-weight baby, which is the highest predictor of stunting.” Stunting in early life is linked to poor educational performance, according to the World Health Organization.
Mohamed has called on the government to raise the monthly childhood support grant, which is meant to help poor parents cover their child’s basic needs, from 530 rand to 796 rand, the minimum amount it says a person needs to buy 2,100 calories-worth of food a day.
According to researchers at the University of Cape Town, 13 million children receive the grant. But 8 million children, most of whose caregivers get the money, still live in households below the food poverty line.
The education department’s plans also need more funds. Extending Grade R to all children would cost 17bn rand to build new facilities and bring existing infrastructure up to scratch, while regulating early childhood centres has not yet been costed, Gwarube says.
In his draft budget speech, the finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, has earmarked an extra 19.1bn rand over three years “to keep 11,000 teachers in classrooms” and 10bn rand for early childhood development, which includes Grade R. It is not clear whether these will still be in the delayed budget, due to be presented on 12 March.
In Soweto, the Nedobonis’ main concern, as they try to officially register their preschool and qualify for grants, is the volume of paperwork. To get funding from the Gauteng provincial government to provide food at the centre, for example, they have to submit 12 different types of documentation.
“I am a very informed person … but I truly can’t tell you what the process is with this whole registration,” says Sindi Nedoboni. “I just want to teach.”
