Minister Siviwe Gwarube: Bana Pele ECD Leadership Summit 2026
Strong Foundations, Strong Future: A National Commitment to Every Child's Early Learning
Address by Minister Siviwe Gwarube at the Bana Pele ECD Leadership Summit 2026
His Excellency, President Cyril Ramaphosa and the First Lady Dr Motsepe
Ministers and Deputy Ministers in the room, especially my co-pilot Dr Mhaule
MECs of Education
Mayors and Members of Mayoral Councils
Director General and Heads of Provincial Education Departments and the staff you lead
Mr Adi Einthoven, from Yellowoods, Gary Lubner from This Day Foundation
Corporate Partners
Civil Society Partners
ECD Practitioners
Members of the Media
Ladies and Gentlemen
Good Morning
Molweni
I want to begin today with a story that I believe will crystalize, for everyone in this room and those at home, the reason why this 2nd Bana Pele ECD Leadership Summit is so important.
I call it The tale of two ten-year-olds
They are the same age. They are equally bright. They are equally deserving of the future this country has to offer.
But their life trajectories diverged somewhere and we must understand where did things go wrong for the one and not the other.
The first ten year old, let us call her Lindiwe.
Lindiwe spends her formative years in an early childhood development centre with structured learning, qualified practitioners and proper nutrition. She is read to from the age of 2. When she starts formal schooling, she is able to hold a pencil, she can read, she is ready to learn.
By Grade 4 Lindiwe has been interacting with a book for 8 years, she reads with understanding and she solves mathematics problems with confidence. Her future is bright and all career pathways are open to her.
The second Ten year old is Nelson. His story begins differently. He does not attend an early learning programme, instead he is raised by his loving Gogo at home.
As nurturing and caring as she is, she simply does not have the training necessary to stimulate Nelson nor can she read to him.
Infact Nelson interacts with a book for the first time in Grade 1. The teacher needs to first teach Nelson to hold a pencil before they can teach them the grade 1 curriculum. The Curriculum moves forward, Nelson is left behind.
Then in Grade 4, both children sit for the same standardised assessment.
Lindiwe has been interacting with books for 8 years, Nelson has only been interacting with a book for 3 years.
Lindiwe will pass and Nelson will be described as not being able to read for meaning.
These international benchmarking tests and our own Systemic Evaluation tell us the same story. 80% of children in South Africa, Like Nelson, cannot read for meaning by Grade 4.
That 80% is the statistic that confronted me in 2024 when I was appointed in this position.
That statistic, that evidence forced me to make a choice.
We could either keep patching the top of the system with Saturday classes, winter camps, autumn camps, spring camps, summer camps and all these other interventions, all the while the cracks keep widening at the bottom.
Or we could go to the root of the problem, to the Foundations of Learning.
In December 2024, we announced a strategic reorientation of the basic education system, with one purpose: to strengthen the foundations of learning. That is our Strong Foundations, Strong Futures Strategy.
If we want Nelson to keep up with the curriculum, we cannot start in Grade 4. We cannot start in Grade 12. We have to start earlier.
Nelson fails in Grade 4 because our system failed him when he was a three-year-old.
And at three years old, he and Lindiwe were no different from each other. But access to an ECD programme was the differentiator. At 3 years old is when their paths began to diverge.
Colleagues,
Three year olds in South Africa do not know what a sphere of government is. They do not know that an early learning programme needs a social worker's visit, an environmental health inspection and municipal approvals before it could become eligible for government support.
They do not know that each of those responsibilities might sit in a different part of the system.
All they know is that there are adults around them and those adults must not fail them.
What separated Nelson from Lindiwe was not talent. It was access to an ECD that provides a safe, structured place to learn, a meal, and a practitioner that is trained to notice when a child needs help.
That is why early childhood development is the strategic lever for everything we want to achieve with our country’s human capital development.
Bana Pele is the vehicle
A lever needs something to move it.
That something is Bana Pele. Bana Pele means children first.
It is the vehicle that drives the Strong Foundations, Strong Futures Strategy.
18 months ago we set ourselves a bold ambition; universal access to quality learning by 2030.
A Shared Blueprint was developed as a collective roadmap, designed to bring together government, practitioners, families, civil society, funders and other partners around that goal.
And from the beginning, we spoke honestly about what it would take.
We understood that we did not simply need more programmes or more money.
We understood that we would have to change the way the system works, and the way we work with one another.
That meant making it easier for early learning programmes to register and be part of the system.
Connecting parts of government that had often worked separately. Building better data. Improving the way funding reaches children. Strengthening the workforce. And creating a clearer path from registration to quality.
Because a Blueprint only matters if it changes what happens beyond the page its typed on.
If a practitioner spends less time navigating the system and more time supporting children.
If a social worker and an environmental health practitioner can solve a problem together instead of passing it between institutions.
If government can see where support is reaching children, where it is not, and where the system is getting stuck.
And, ultimately, if more children receive the quality early learning they need.
A year and a half on, we are beginning to see those changes.
The work is far from finished. But the path ahead is becoming clearer.
We are moving from Blueprint to movement. And now our task is to turn that movement into scale.
But what have been the changes in real terms?
Let me start with perhaps the most important ones.
Today, more children are being reached than any other time in the history of this country.
Two years ago, just over 748,000 children were receiving the ECD subsidy.
Today, that number is 954,700.
That is more than 200,000 additional children receiving support in just two years. We are less that 50 000 shy of having 1 million children benefitting from the ECD subsidy.
Universal access will take sustained public investment, and government has begun putting significantly more resources behind early learning.
The daily subsidy has increased from R17 to R24 per child.
The subsidy budget has grown from R3.43 billion in 2024/25 to R6.49 billion in the current financial year, and is projected to reach R9.1 billion by 2028/29.
We have created a R496 Million Outcomes Based Fund to create 115 000 ECD spaces in South Africa’s most rural provinces of KZN, EC and Limpopo.
The largest such fund in the world.
A bigger budget is progress.
A child actually reached is impact.
The subsidy reaches programmes that are registered at Silver or Gold.
Those levels exist for good reason: It is meant to keep children safe, and to make sure the early learning they receive is of good quality.
The question is not only how much we are investing. It is how many more programmes we can help meet those standards, so that our support gets to more children, especially those who need it most.
So how are we helping programmes get there?
It starts with being able to see them.
For a long time, government did not have a complete picture of the early learning sector we were trying to support.
Programmes existed. Practitioners were doing the work. Children were being cared for.
But too many of them were invisible to the system.
That is changing. eCares is South Africa’s first end-to-end digital registration system, with a national master list of early learning programmes.
It already verifies staff against the National Child Protection Register, that means all registered ECD centres have their practitioners vetted against that NCPR, this greatly improves child safety and gives parents peace of mind.
SASSA and Home Affairs integrations are planned next.
The aim here is fewer documents for parents and practitioners, and to enable faster checks on our side.
Mr President,
Today, almost 40,000 early learning programmes are registered, bringing around 1.6 million children into view through these registered programmes.
And here too, we are beginning to see momentum.
By the end of September, 1,343 programmes had received Silver or Gold approval since the start of this year.
During September alone, the daily rate of approvals rose from between 10 to 15 a day to around 25 to 30. We have doubled our rate of approvals.
At the same time, we should not pretend that putting a process online solves every problem.
Some practitioners still struggle with digital access. Some need face-to-face assistance. And every new system teaches us something about the realities of the people using it.
So we are building the system while learning from its users.
And that brings me to another lesson we have learned.
A child’s needs do not fall into neat departmental boxes. Our systems do.
Registering one early learning programme requires a social worker, an environmental health practitioner, a municipality and the provincial department.
The practitioner should not have to carry that complexity alone.
So we asked those people to work on it together. All eight metros and all 44 district municipalities are now part of the registration effort, reaching South Africa’s full network of 257 municipalities across all nine provinces.
More than 1,700 environmental health practitioners have been engaged.
And the environmental health reports that registration depends on have grown from around 700 in April to over 4,100 in October. A growth of 500% in just 6 months.
One of our colleagues who took part in the onboarding workshops described what it felt like being in the room with all role players, saying, “this is where we found each other.”
That may sound like a small sentence. It is not. Systems change when people stop seeing a problem as someone else’s to solve but see themselves as an enable for positive change.
Behind these improvements, sit changes to the rules themselves. Revised environmental health norms support a more developmental approach. And the Children’s Amendment Bill is intended to simplify registration through a single process.
While recognising the different ways early learning is actually provided across South Africa, including home-based, community-based, mobile and playgroup programmes.
Because a child should not be disadvantaged simply because government is organised in silos.
But universal access cannot mean access to whatever happens to be available.
Getting a child through the door is not the finish line. It is just the start.
Access must then translate into quality.
So we are investing in the people providing early learning. The Director-General has approved a human resource development plan for the ECD workforce, with a competency framework and a professional pathway. Practical curriculum support materials have been prepared in all 11 official languages.
A national quality tool is being piloted. And a developmental screening tool now covers children from birth to five, helping us identify developmental delays and disabilities earlier.
The principle is simple. Every child should take part meaningfully, not merely be present in an ECD.
Perhaps one of the most important changes is harder to measure. It is the way people are beginning to work around the same problem.
More than 75 NGOs and social service organisations are supporting registration. Five Bana Pele Community Hubs are being prototyped. And joint outreach with SASSA and Home Affairs now pairs birth registration with early learning registration clinics.
Partners are beginning to coordinate funding, implementation, data, community networks and support around a common goal.
And this is important because Bana Pele does not ask every organisation to become the same. Different institutions will continue to have different mandates, different expertise and different ways of working.
The challenge is whether we can hold those differences while staying united around one non-negotiable: children first. Bana Pele!
I will be honest: collaboration is not automatic nor is it easy. Institutions have habits. Mandates have boundaries. Funding has conditions. Information sits in different places.
We can work differently but at the same time be working together to achieve a shared goal.
That is what moving from Blueprint to movement really means. It is not simply having more organisations around the table. Yes that’s important but also important is whether we are changing what we do because the people around that table are adding and sharing value.
And while we should take confidence from the progress we have made, we should not take our foot off the pedal.
Around 1.2 million children aged three to five currently access early learning.
That still leaves a gap of about one million children.
One million children not accessing any ECD programme is not a statistic we can become comfortable with.
It is the distance we still need to cover.
So the question before us now is How do we make what is beginning to work, work everywhere?
Government will do its part, as it must!
We will create enabling regulation, fund public priorities, build systems that work, and remove barriers where we have the authority to remove them.
But Bana Pele was never a government-only project. The people in this room hold other pieces of the solution.
Some of you bring community trust. Some bring practitioner networks. Some bring technology, data or research.
Some bring funding, training or implementation capacity. And some of you have the authority to remove a barrier that nobody else can.
So I do not need to ask you whether you support universal access to quality early learning.
You would not be here if you did not.
The more important question is: What part of the system can you help make work better?
That is the question I hope we carry into the rest of this Summit.
And particularly into tomorrow’s working sessions.
Those sessions will not solve every problem in just a morning.
But they will give us a place to move from agreement to action, and from action to commitment.
Closing
Because neither Lindiwe nor Nelson will ever know which department approved which document, which organisation funded an intervention, which database carried their information or which meeting removed the barrier.
Nor should they have to.
All they need to know is that there was a safe place for them to learn at three. That the adults around them were supported.
That someone noticed when they needed help. That the system showed up for them.
In seven years, a child who is three today will be ten. They will sit the same assessment that Nelson sat. On that day, they will tell us whether we kept our word.
That is the test we should keep returning to.
We should keep asking “Does this put the child first?”
If the answer is yes, we move forward.
If the answer is no, we change it.
That is how a Blueprint becomes a movement. And how a movement will change the trajectory of South Africa. One child at a time, by giving that child Strong Foundations for a Strong Future.
That is Bana Pele!
Ndolivhuva!
Nakhensa Axinene!
Ndiyabulela!
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