From the Executive Director's Desk Q2, 2024

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S DESK
Second Quarter newsletter 2024

What a great privilege to work for an organisation of such calibre that recognises children who are either denied access or left behind by the education system and entire society for reasons ranging from social, economic, and otherwise. Children in the informal settlements of Khayelitsha are heavily burdened by so many challenges which they are not supposed to experience as children. To add to their load, they lack very basic play materials to stimulate their development milestones and enjoy their childhood free from fear.

This quarter has been one of those highly impactful seasons regarding our mandated
deliverables within our organisation, and for that, we are so grateful that God has sustained our work under such difficult working conditions and helped our facilitators and fieldworkers to deliver such quality educational outcomes that contribute towards children thriving by the age of 5 years. We believe that our learning programs deliver high quality, scalable, measurable and sustainable developmental milestones.

Quarterly reflections:

This quarter has been filled with lots of different activities as set out in our strategic plan, but what surprised us is that our team has over and above covered activities that are in and out of our scope but still tie up very closely with advocating for the rights of children.

SISO facilitators have shown commitment to go beyond the call of duty maximizing impact and good stewardship towards our donors and supporters. They have:
- gone an extra mile to send children to medical care facilities because parents have neglected their duties
- represented children in school meetings because parents weren’t available
- bought clothes for needy children out of their pockets, and many more activities. 

Quarter 2 has been amazing in terms of deliverables in all milestones that have been set, all were achieved with distinction. Starting from stimulation of young children under challenging learning environments, and the developmental milestones showed very positive skyrocketing improvements in all areas of development (See snapshot of one area of our PREGRRA Report below). This is our biggest contribution towards reducing the 40% of children who are not in any form of early learning and development.

Deliverable 2 is Training and Capacity Development. This was not only focusing on parents, caregivers, ECD facility practitioners but also to our team internally. The empowerment of parents through various interventions has made caregivers better carers of their children. ECD practitioners have also been introduced to computers in addition to their weekly teacher trainings, and our support staff monitors are happy with the progress in the ECD facilities. Our team members participated in different capacity development activities like teacher training, inclusive education training, First Aid training, governance training, fundraising, community development training, different online workshops etc, and the results are seen and observed on how our programs have improved and uplifted.

Deliverable 3 is linked to the toy library which has experienced a huge increase in the number of children attending this service. This has also been improved by our brand new school bus that was donated by our generous funders and individuals who have made their contributions.

Closing remarks:
In terms of our operations, our teams have done a great job. I would also like to commend the leadership of the organisation for putting extra effort in everything, making sure everything goes according to plans.

To close the quarter, we were surprised when both our Director and M&E Officer received the honour of being nominated as "Phenomenal Men" from one of Funders. This was a great honour and motivation to each employee. Thank you.

We are saddened to have to say goodbye to Ms Thembi Nxesi who is retiring, and thank her for her many year of service to the organisation. We wish her everything of the best for her future.

Last but not least, our team did an internal assessment of some of our young children to measure their development against basic benchmarks for their age. Here is a snapshot of the language development function results from our internal assessment - here you can see that children in the informal settlements have little exposure to animal sounds, struggle with identifying emotions (this may be linked to covid and mask use) and are not familiar with all colours (something we will ensure our teachers can focus on). 

We are grateful to serve our communities to prepare their children for formal schooling and one day, their careers. ​