Shaping the future today South Africa’s future depends on its children’s brainpower — and a child’s brain grows fastest in the first few years of life. To help children reach their full potential in those early years, they need nutritious food, early language development through age-appropriate books and responsive caregiving. Yet too many receive few or any of these crucial building blocks. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed from multiple angles, as suggested by the recommendations of the latest Thrive by Five Index. This learning brief is the first in an issue dedicated to unpacking how early childhood development can be strengthened in South Africa. It looks at what the 2024 Thrive by Five Index tells us about young children’s early development and how DGMT’s pivotal projects have put the recommendations from the Index into action — from thinking about how to best spend budgets to rolling out on-the-ground interventions that can help reduce chronic malnutrition manifesting as stunting, help get children ready to read and do maths, and support parents to give their children the best start through responsive caregiving. Building better: Why tracking quality is part of strengthening early childhood development in South Africa The earlier we invest in children’s development, the better. In South Africa, this means improving both access to and quality of learning programmes: about a third of the country’s 3–5-year-olds do not attend any form of an early learning programme (ELP) and of the children who are enrolled, about 60% are not developmentally on track. This learning brief examines how the process of developing an early learning programme quality assurance and support system unfolded, the progress achieved and the challenges ahead. Programme quality has two dimensions. The first, structural quality, relates to the physical setting in which children learn. The second, process quality, refers to how a programme creates opportunities for children to interact with the world around them. Aiming for gold: How to make it easier for early learning programmes to get state support Thousands of early learning programmes (ELPs) in South Africa are not able to access state subsidies and official support because they are not registered with the Department of Basic Education (DBE). It’s a catch-22: to be registered, programmes must meet a set of regulatory requirements, which often requires a lot of money. In the end, children pay the price: about a third of 3–5-year-olds — about 1.15 million children — are not enrolled in an ELP. In addition, almost 60% of enrolled four-year-olds are not on track with regard to developmental milestones, as shown by the 2024 Thrive by Five Index. Financial support to help ELPs improve the quality of their service would ultimately translate into better child outcomes. This learning brief looks at how early learning programmes can be assisted to access state support and how Ilifa Labantwana’s work over almost two decades has helped shape and improve South Africa’s early childhood development ecosystem, contributing to the implementation of a streamlined system that helps programmes register to receive subsidies and support.