A different policy lens for at-scale early learning delivery

By Rebecca Hickman and Grace Matlhape

In the world of social impact, systems thinking is on-trend – and for good reason. For population-level early education interventions, like SmartStart in South Africa, it provides a new tool to break open understanding of what it will take to succeed. Perhaps just as importantly, its methodologies warn us about the factors most likely to thwart the best laid plans and policies.

The working premise of SmartStart is that any effective solution to close the early learning access gap, necessitates moving beyond conventional programme models. In other words, the goal is not simply to be a larger intervention, it is to create a fundamentally different delivery mechanism that is capable of reaching every child. At the start of 2024, SmartStart early learning programmes were reaching 76,000 pre-school children across South Africa. One year on, there are 120,000 children enrolled at nearly 13,000 programmes in every type of community and context – an increase of nearly 60% in just twelve months.

What has enabled this kind of massive growth? And what lessons might there be for improving equity, reach and quality in other public services? Funding of course plays a central role, but when funding chases low points of leverage in the system, the impact often does not match the investment. This is where systems thinking comes in.

Why systems thinking?

The word ‘system’ is hardly new, but systems thinking does not mean just thinking about how to improve systems. It invites us to use a completely different framework to consider the intricate inter-weavings of the variables that bear on the problem we want to solve.

Systems thinking is a way of understanding complex systems that sees the whole system – rather than single elements, events or actors – and considers relationships and interdependencies. It helps both government and non-government organisations (NGOs) consider questions such as, have we named the problem correctly? Are we seeing all the upstream causes? Have we thought through all the downstream effects of our solution? And, crucially, are we intervening at the highest point of leverage?

Highlighting the implementation gap

An analysis of government systems that comprise the early learning regulatory framework in South Africa – such as financing, curriculum, qualifications and health and safety – reveals two things. Firstly, these systems do not, by themselves, either unlock new supply or build quality in early learning programmes. In a quasi market of provision, with endemic under-resourcing, programmes do not automatically self-establish or self-improve just because the right state regulatory systems exist. Moreover, solving for at-scale delivery is very different to regulating.

Secondly, government systems do not naturally bend towards equity. In fact, where the internal imperatives of bureaucracies are disconnected from the ordinary lives and environments of people, there is high risk that those bureaucracies will reproduce or even magnify social injustices.

This divergence between intended policy outcomes and what is actually happening on the ground, can be understood as an implementation gap.

Beyond state systems

This implementation gap tells us that while state systems are important, they tell only one part of the story. Transforming the whole system, requires us to have clear line of sight of the factors and dynamics at every level, including community and household, which are contributing to system failure.

For example, the highly informal nature of many early learning programmes in low-income communities in South Africa, is both an upstream cause and a downstream effect of an inappropriate regulatory regime – creating a reinforcing loop. This is because programmes that set up in under-resourced contexts are forced to use what is available – whether that relates to infrastructure, staffing, materials or food. But what is available, however resourcefully deployed, does not always conform to the norms of a narrowly conceptualised regulatory framework. This means that not only these programmes, but also the children attending them, are effectively excluded from that framework, which therefore cannot perform its core purpose.

Seeing strength

In this and other ways, systems thinking encourages us to pay attention to the value of what is already there, and to choose an asset-based approach that sees South Africa’s resources rather than its deficits. For SmartStart, this has meant actively harnessing the nascent assets in communities – such as under-employed women with the aptitudes to provide quality care and learning; home and community venues; vibrant forms of informal economic activity; and perhaps most importantly of all, the inherent abundance in every child.

Much of the magic that can be found in home and community-based early learning programmes does not happen in spite of the setting, but because of it – because of the relatability of a personal context, because of the small group size, because of the cultural rootedness, because of the social relationship between the practitioner and the children’s parents.

So the challenge for policy and programming solutions is first to see these attributes, and then to use them as our starting point – not as things to be tolerated or fixed, but strengths that can be built from.

Shifting the government lens

Sitting in the complexity of a comprehensive systems map (such as the one to be launched soon by the Early Childhood Development Action Network), blows apart the assumption that the right government policies and funding can solve everything. It invites humility on the part of governments – to see the wider and deeper systems that are at play; social systems, knowledge systems, power systems, to name a few.

And that insight helps government to see that there is very little they can solve alone.

In South Africa, this understanding has helped to inform the new 2030 Strategy for ECD Programmes, which the Department of Basic Education published earlier this year. The Strategy proposes a new Social Compact for ECD which brings all role-players together – the ECD sector, NGOs, business, donors, and, most importantly, families and communities.

The Strategy also acknowledges that closing the early learning access and quality gaps requires new forms of partnership. Government has a pivotal role to play in leading and planning, but it cannot in the near-term build a new public service from scratch, so its priority is radical ecosystem enablement – working closely with social partners who are well-placed to expand service delivery rapidly and equitably.

Systems not programmes

In many low and middle-income countries, early learning provisioning has been strongly influenced by a ‘development’ model, with non-government organisations (NGOs) playing a vital role compensating for service delivery failures. However, of necessity, NGOs generally tackle challenges programmatically. This means they develop interventions that engage with specific failings in the system – such as, lack of training or resources – or that tackle issues at sub-population level. This can unintentionally contribute to uneven service coverage and destabilising levels of fragmentation.

In the sphere of early learning, this focuses attention on the need for end-to-end delivery platforms. ‘Platform’ in this sense means a type of networked organisation that, with its partners, provides the full service delivery continuum in a single value chain, and so can engineer access and quality wherever it is needed – effectively replicating public service delivery models in the non-state sector.

Joining the dots

Systems thinking does not permit siloed solutions. This is because we cannot pick off one part of the system and somehow seal it off from the rest. If our focus is early learning, then the solution must consider how factors such as stunting, toxic stress and indigenous knowledge systems directly influence early childhood outcomes. In other words, factors that might sit outside the mandate of the lead government department or the conventional parameters of an early learning programme, will bear directly on final impact.

The recently published Lancet series on the ‘The next 1000 days’ emphasises the importance of multisectoral partnerships across education, health, nutrition and social protection. This presents an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, there is a risk that over-loading a single delivery channel dilutes rather than increases impact. On the other hand, re-imagining ways of partnering for multi-component interventions presents an exciting opportunity to test new approaches in the pre-school phase.

Towards consensus

Mapping complex systems forces us to step back and use evidence to describe what is actually happening, rather than what is meant to be happening. In terms of expanding access to early learning, this helps us see why the dial has barely flickered in South Africa over the past decade.

More importantly, the shared narration of events enables consensus to be built around where and how to intervene, and what to prioritise, in order to transform outcomes for children. In South Africa, this trains our attention on the unique potential of home and community-based early learning programmes to expand access more quickly, equitably and affordably.

Systems thinking is complicated, sometimes even bewildering. But it slows us down, to speed us up. Arguably, it is our tendency towards simplicity that has confounded the most well-intentioned policies and programmes. In early learning as elsewhere, if the problem is multilayered, then the solution must be too.