Food Security initiative advancing nutrition

Funda Khula focuses on community action-based work to address systems barriers - constraints in resources, historic and discriminatory spatial planning, capacity of caregivers, nutrition, and teacher shortages - to early learning access. By providing equitable access to tools, knowledge, and services, the programme ensures that all children, regardless of their economic background, have the opportunity to thrive in their early years of education. A strong pillar of this work is to embed community action, engagement and support to build systems of early learning that can be sustainable. This approach is informed by the education gaps that South African children face because of inadequate early childhood development foundations being provided; this is especially because many caregivers do not have the resources necessary to track and manage their children's developmental milestones. The project intends to create impact through:

1. Removing resource barriers - many households in the targeted communities lack access to basic in-home learning materials. By providing households with low-cost resources like play kits - some of which will be homemade, and reading materials, the programme ensure that children have accessible tools for play-based learning to continue in the home.
2. Community-based learning - the project establishes community playgroups and caregiver support circles, bring ECD services closer to families; designed to be inclusive and accessible, the project ensures that even though the focus is on under-served and remote areas, the project will see success by reducing geographic and economic barriers by decentralising ECD services.
3. Empowering caregivers - a critical part of early development, many caregivers lack the skills to track development milestones and foster learning through play. This approach empowers active parenting, enhancing and broadening how education is accessed by children.
4. Addressing nutrition - as a foundational aspect of development and learning, the project responds to challenges of malnutrition by identifying nutrition gaps ensuring that children are physically and cognitively prepared to engage in their learning.
5. Local capacity building - by strengthening the capacity of local community to produce and train their own practitioners, a steady pipeline of teachers in ECD is created while also directly increasing the employability of youth while sustainably improving the quality of ECD services available at a local level. The locally-focused approach also ensures that educational programmes are contextually and culturally relevant for children in those communities - this also addresses language barriers.

The programme is still being piloted and lessons learned will be developed as we progress.