Cotlands

There is nothing more important than ensuring every child has the right to thrive in their earliest years. Nurturing care sets every child on a healthy path of development to their full potential. We know what works and what children need. We know how important nutrition and play are to the billions of neural pathways forming in our first 5 years.

And yet… so many children, here in South Africa and around the world, are denied access to these basics in Early Childhood Development (ECD).

The prize will allow me and my team to deliver on Cotlands' bold vision of dismantling all the blocks between every child and the best care and support in those critical years, even – or rather especially – where resources are lacking.

We have designed a comprehensive in-work training programme for the informal network of the many (mostly) women who deliver care day in day out. Often uneducated, lacking ECD training, mostly lacking digital access or literacy, working out of the system, they are the gatekeepers to a thriving generation. Cotlands IGNITE starts with where these facilitators are and the prize will allow us to fund its launch and take the programme to scale. 

I am proud to carry the baton of innovation and commitment to ensuring no child is left behind.  South Africa and the organisation I serve bear little resemblance to the world of 1936, when Cotlands was founded. Yet the thread of serving the most marginalised children with excellence remains.

 I am proud to lead an amazing organisation full of individuals committed to identifying and working to overcome ALL the blocks (direct and indirect, contextual or systemic) to the urgent task of supporting all care givers and parents to deliver the best for every child. Each day we witness the impact of multiple inequalities on the developmental and life opportunities of our children living in poverty.

 I have focused all my professional and academic energies to identify ways of serving our most important clients – children – no matter what the circumstances of their birth and early years.

My goal is to show that lack of resources and the impact of intergenerational poverty are no reason for a child to be deprived of the very best opportunities in their earliest years. I want to support Cotlands to demonstrate how this can be achieved in South Africa and across other under-resourced settings. 

In South Africa, ECD is a national priority. And yet, over 4 million of our youngest children - 60% - live below the poverty line. These children are the most likely to be out of the formal ECD provision – cared for in informal environments, lacking even basic toys, and with untrained staff. COVID-19 has pushed more people into poverty, with these children and their families facing hunger and lack of support.

Cotlands focuses on taking the best practices of ECD and making the resources and skills available to children wherever they are. We do this through a successful integrated toy library and playgroup scheme, providing educational toys to informal ECD centres (where the majority of children are cared for) and through a mobile library. We support staff and parents to unlock the skills and confidence to deliver play-based learning routinely. We also integrate nutrition support and training.

 We deliver our own services and also provide technical assistance to other NGOs. Taking this one step further, over the past 2 years, we have co-designed an entirely new vocational education qualification in ECD with the South African government, specifically designed for in-work study and for carers without strong educational backgrounds. 

Our approach is to take excellence to the hardest to reach – with our core mission to improve ECD services in marginalized communities with limited resources. Alongside our own service delivery – focused outside the ECD centre network - we amplify this through promoting play-based learning and supporting in-person and online training for capacity building in government, NPOs and ECD staff to implement our proven model.

Our innovation is to take this one step further and to focus on the people looking after those children, adapting and scaling that support to take into account their locations, skills and the impact of multiple inequalities.

Our positive disruption is to take this to national and we hope global scale by co-designing and rolling-out a formal vocational educational qualification, delivered and assessed in those community care settings, and with educational practice designed to remove all barriers to entry. This also includes the provision of digital tools, data and even basic digital literacy.

We apply a community-asset based approach to create a multi-level solution which harnesses the interest, skills and talents within the community with the goal of overcoming the barriers to ensure that children in marginalized communities receive the best ECD. 

Supporting the youngest and most marginalized children is critical for the SDGs – to reach the furthest first and to leave nobody behind. It is also fundamental for each and every child whose chance to thrive in life is formed by their developmental experience in their earliest years.

Our first focus is to ensure that every child who is served by our team, or by teams trained in our model, receives the best play-based learning and nutrition, supporting their development and increasing their school-readiness.  

 Our larger focus is – having worked with ECD and government partners - to roll out the Cotlands IGNITE vocational educational programme, to share our learnings with the global ECD community to apply to scale, and to share within South Africa to inform broader learning on educational digital inequalities. By starting with those delivering ECD and their contexts and working out we can achieve sustainable and long-lasting impact.

 Poor early childhood development is a key driver of poverty and inequality because it traps poor children into an intergenerational cycle of poverty. Cotlands is committed to effectively addressing key early learning and development gaps and giving children the opportunity to not only survive, but thrive into adulthood.