Cape Town - “Our work is urgent if we are to change our country for the better,” said Candice Potgieter, CEO of The Unlimited Child.
Having developed and implemented a proven and scalable programme, The Unlimited Child has made more than a 1.2 million children school-ready to date.
According to the Non-Profit Organisation, they have trained over 7 800 Early Childhood Development (ECD) practitioners and developed more than 3 200 ECD centres countrywide.
The first and only one of its kind in South Africa, this NPO says its ambition, in partnership with many like-minded philanthropies and corporates, is to scale this exponentially in the next five years, expanding well beyond the borders of South Africa.
Since its inception in 2008, The Unlimited Child has grown from five créches in KwaZulu-Natal to over 3 200 ECD centres countrywide.
The organisation says there are still millions of children being left behind who urgently need attention.
In every child’s life, a critical learning foundation needs to be established by the age of six. If this window of opportunity is not realised, many children will face an almost insurmountable uphill battle, not only as they enter school, but as they progress through their lives, says the organisation.
“If South Africa’s education crisis is to be effectively addressed with a view to shifting the country’s socio-economic future, it is crucial that ECD becomes a priority so that more children can achieve their basic education and have the opportunity to live an unlimited life,” said Potgieter.
Unlimited potential needs a foundation.
“Every child is born with unlimited potential, but in South Africa some 64% of children who start Grade 1 will not finish school. Set against this harsh reality, The Unlimited Child is shifting the nation’s future through its proven ECD model that in 2020 achieved the milestone of making more than one million children school-ready,” she said.
According to the organisation, if a child does not have access to ECD, their potential in life will be a three out of 10, with no possibility of ever reaching a 10 out of 10, and no teacher in the world will be able to change this.
If the early foundations of the Three Rs – Reading, Writing and Arithmetic – are not formed, a child will experience a lifetime of challenges.
“A child under the age of six holds the greatest promise for change in our society. By investing in children from a young age, we invest in a society that stands the chance to thrive in 20 years’ time,” she said.
The highly scalable expansion of the organisation has been achieved by unlocking the potential of pre-existing child-minding facilities.
“From the outset, our unique model was developed with an ability to scale, by being easily duplicated across any geographic context. This is why today we operate across sub-Saharan Africa, having launched in Lesotho and Zimbabwe in 2021,” said Potgieter.
Neither the Covid-19 pandemic, civil unrest, nor the flood disaster in KZN has kept the organisation down.
“We were able to recover and sustain over 95% of our ECD centre network by pivoting to supply more than R30 million in relief aid to make sure that not a single child was left behind.
“The high impact model of The Unlimited Child is a simple solution of skills development, toys and resources, mentoring and coaching so that every ECD centre exists with the single goal of school readiness in mind. We know that if we don’t pitch our goals high, children will be left behind, and we cannot let that happen on our watch because their future starts now,” said Potgieter.
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