Give every child the benefit of early childhood development

ECD Connect

ECD Connect is a unique digital offering that seeks to empower early childhood development practitioners and community health workers to deliver services to young children in South Africa. It is a license-free, customisable platform designed with the support of behavioural scientists and ECD specialists to enhance the quality of and increase access to crucial early childhood services, including education and health. This platform supports practitioners and organisations operating in low-resourced environments to scale and deliver professional, high-quality services to young children and caregivers in their communities.

The disconnect

This explains why the project exists

Investment in early childhood development is key to ensuring children benefit from formal schooling, and later in life, from improved health, social, and economic outcomes, to reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty.¹

The South African National Development Plan (NDP) commits to ensuring that every child in South Africa has access to the full range of ECD services by 2030,² which includes not just early learning stimulation, but also maternal and child health, nutrition, social protection, and support for caregivers.

From an education standpoint, less than 40% of our country’s 3–5-year-olds are enrolled in any form of early learning programme (ELP).³ Of those children fortunate enough to be attending ELPs, less than half are developmentally on track, and past inequities in access to quality education remain a critical challenge, with children from income quintile 1 almost twice as likely to be falling behind than their quintile 5 peers.⁴

There are currently just under 200 000 staff working in ECD programmes across the country.⁵ Almost half of all ECD teaching and managerial staff are under-qualified (i.e. do not have at least an NQF4 qualification), whilst more than a fifth do not possess any form of ECD qualification whatsoever.⁶ In pure number terms, universal access to early learning would require another 210 000 trained practitioners and a further 140 000 assistants,⁷ all of whom would require financial sustainability in a sector where some 90% of workers currently earn below minimum wage.⁸

The above serves to illustrate the significant gaps in both funding and qualified personnel if South Africa is to meet 2030 targets, and this extends to other challenges within ECD, such as nutritional stunting, where 27% of children under the age of 5 are unlikely to reach their full growth and development potential due to irreversible physical and cognitive damage caused by persistent nutritional deprivation.⁹

While there are many programmes in place to address the various issues across the ECD spectrum, it’s clear that efforts need to be dramatically augmented in order to meet the challenge. Technology must be considered as a cost-effective means to help scale these programmes in the absence of available capital and trained personnel

The majority of South Africans are stuck in an inequality trap with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Most are stuck in intergenerational loops of exclusion with few chances to escape. Breaking this cycle requires a fundamental change in life trajectories, starting in the womb.

Think of a Möbius strip – just one twist in the circle allows you to trace a completely different pattern. Instead of being stuck on the inside of a loop, you emerge on the outside. In the same way, escaping the inequality trap requires a fundamental twist to set South Africa on a new path.

The twist in thinking

This explains how the project approaches problems

ECD Connect is a unique digital offering that seeks to empower early childhood development practitioners and community health workers to deliver services to young children in South Africa. It functions primarily as a digital work companion for frontline ECD workers (such as teachers, principals, and community health workers), and serves as a multi-purpose data collection, monitoring and support platform for organisations running programmes in the sector.

The platform’s modular design and features cater to a broad array of settings across multiple services within ECD. It has been developed specifically for low-resource contexts and with accessibility front of mind. Behavioural insights are leveraged to motivate and inspire practitioners to carry out activities that result in positive outcomes for children.

ECD Connect provides practitioners with:
interactive tools, resources and, importantly, feedback to help them successfully perform their roles, whether that be running a successful early learning programme or managing a roster of clients as a community health worker
in-app courses for ongoing professional development.
access to a community of fellow practitioners who can offer much-needed support and guidance.

While solving for the practitioners’ pain points has been central to the design, a license-free administrator’s portal equips organisations to monitor their programmes (and facilitate more effective interventions) by collecting and analysing near-real-time data to help build a clearer picture of what is happening on the ground. This is further bolstered by mobile applications for field support agents.

The vision for ECD Connect is that wider adoption of the tool could establish a valuable database allowing for critical information flow between parallel ECD programmes/services, as well as eventual integration with government management information systems (MIS), providing key field-originated insights to help inform public policy.

Digital platforms are costly and difficult to develop and maintain. ECD Connect aims to fulfil this function across a wide range of organisations in the sector, promoting greater cohesion amongst sector participants and allowing limited resources to rather be channelled to programmes and their beneficiaries, instead of technical development.

The trajectory change

This explains what the project is doing to make a difference

Understanding the needs of the end user has been central to ECD Connect’s approach. Considerable time was spent at the outset listening to the challenges faced by our target users and witnessing how they engaged with technology. This included extensive field-based work across multiple provinces, engaging directly with ECD practitioners from across the urban-rural spectrum to ensure the platform would accommodate users from diverse backgrounds.

ECD Connect partnered with SmartStart and Grow Great to design and deliver two customised digital platforms: Funda App for early learning practitioners and CHW Connect for community health workers supporting maternal & newborn health. The platforms have been launched successfully into their respective networks, and ECD Connect continues to work closely with both organisations during the scale-up phase of implementation.

Building on this foundation, ECD Connect has developed early education platforms designed for use by NGOs (ECD Connect Partner) and independent ECD centres (ECD Connect App). ECD Connect Partner was launched in October 2024, in collaboration with Ntataise, Khululeka and True North, whilst the ECD Connect App was made freely available in April 2025. The platform has demonstrated strong early growth, achieving over 1700 user sign-ups and more than 2300 children registered as of October 2025, surpassing initial targets well ahead of schedule.

Looking ahead, ECD Connect aims to expand its reach through ongoing platform development and the establishment of a robust stakeholder ecosystem that can support users in communities across South Africa and beyond. A key focus will be on enabling partner organisations to use the data generated through the platform to better support their practitioner networks by identifying challenges, strengthening practice, and informing programme improvement. Over time, aggregated data from across the platform can also offer a more nuanced picture of the ECD landscape in South Africa, contributing to shared understanding and coordination across the sector.

Trying to change life trajectories is ambitious and profound. It requires us to radically influence the lives of individuals and to be part of changing the circumstances in which they live.