What we are reading...

ENCA discussed South Africa’s proposed Maternal Support Grant (MSG), designed to reduce maternal and child malnutrition, has faced over a decade of delays despite strong supporting evidence. Civil society urges urgent implementation, while government concerns about cost and policy alignment persist.

This executive summary outlines how multiple, overlapping global crises like the COVID‑19 pandemic, climate breakdown, conflict, inflation, and food insecurity are widening gaps in young children’s development, health, and access to services. It calls for child‑centred, system‑level solutions in policy, financing, and protection to help children thrive despite these compounded pressures.

This report examines how interconnected global crises including climate change, conflict, inequality, and economic instability are intensifying risks to young children’s development, health, and well‑being. It highlights structural barriers, calls for child‑centred policy, financing, and systemic transformation, and offers adaptive strategies and recommendations for stakeholders to better support children globally.

This annual flagship report from the Children’s Institute focuses on early childhood development (ECD) in South Africa, tracking progress against the National Integrated ECD Policy and highlighting critical gaps in health, nutrition, learning access and social support. It presents data showing ongoing high child poverty, stunting and low developmental outcomes, and recommends strengthened investment and coordinated services to ensure young children thrive.

This UNICEF South Africa report provides a comprehensive overview of the living conditions of children and adolescents across key sectors like health, nutrition, education, water and sanitation, and social protection. It highlights persistent vulnerabilities, deprivations and barriers faced by young people, including multidimensional poverty, health and education gaps, and unequal access to services, and serves as a call to action for policymakers and stakeholders to improve children’s rights and well‑being.

This is a set of 2025 country profiles developed under the Nurturing Care Framework by UNICEF in collaboration with Countdown to 2030: Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health. The profiles compile key indicators and data on early childhood development across nearly 200 countries to support monitoring, planning and policy action on nurturing care, early learning, health, nutrition and child well‑being globally.

To improve and strengthen the delivery of the ECD function, the review examines expenditure that is allocated to ECD, identifies opportunities to increase or improve expenditure, and suggests ways to strengthen inter-departmental and cross-government collaboration to help ensure that all children in South Africa receive a comprehensive package of integrated support and services to build the foundations to thrive later in life.

This report is a 2024 advisory by South Africa’s National Planning Commission ECD Advisory Report. It argues that better coordination across government departments and spheres is essential to build an integrated early childhood development (ECD) strategy that can inform the 2024‑29 Medium‑Term National Development Plan. The advisory highlights current coordination gaps and calls for urgent action to ensure children benefit from equitable, quality ECD services and stronger state capacity.

This is a guidance resource outlining indicators and tools to assess responsive caregiving and early learning practices in young children’s families and communities. It defines measurable behaviours (like play, communication and caregiver engagement), suggests data sources (surveys, observation tools), and helps programmes monitor and improve nurturing care for early childhood development.

This review shows that South Africa’s Child Support Grant (CSG) reached over 13 million children but remains too low to protect them from hunger, malnutrition and stunting. It finds high child poverty rates, racially‑ and geographically‑unequal deprivation, and recommends increasing the CSG to at least the food poverty line to substantially reduce child poverty and improve child well‑being.

This is a summary of a Sight and Life nutrition series piece emphasising adolescence as a critical yet often overlooked window for nutrition. It highlights increased nutrient needs, links to growth and development, and calls for targeted interventions to improve diets, break intergenerational malnutrition, and support long-term health outcomes.

This brief report summarises evidence that tobacco use especially maternal smoking and second-hand smoke exposure is linked to child stunting, affecting growth and development. It’s an advocacy tool for health professionals and policymakers to strengthen tobacco control and protect child health.

This handbook provides judges and legal practitioners with guidance on applying South African law to online harms — such as hate speech, disinformation, and harmful digital content. It explains legal standards, relevant statutes, case law, and practical decision‑making tools to help courts protect fundamental rights while addressing emerging digital challenges.

This case-based report shows how small, data-informed adjustments in early learning programmes can significantly boost young children’s developmental outcomes. It highlights nine key conditions for scaling improvements, the role of reliable data (ELOM), practitioner support, collaboration, timely feedback, sustainable funding, and real-world South African examples

This report shows that over 80% of South African learners cannot read for meaning by Grade 3, and home language proficiency strongly predicts later success in additional languages and grade progression. While teacher reading competencies have improved, maths knowledge lags. Provincial assessments and programmes like the Western Cape’s Back-on-Track show promising effects, but systemic challenges—including budget constraints, unfunded mandates, teacher supply gaps, and weak national planning—continue to limit improvements in foundational literacy and numeracy.

This report presents a national background report for the 2030 Reading Panel synthesising new evidence on early-grade literacy in South Africa. Drawing on large-scale survey data, it shows that most learners are not yet reading at expected levels, highlights wide inequalities across provinces and languages, and reviews system constraints and emerging interventions. The report stresses coordinated national action, sustained funding, and scaling evidence-based literacy programmes to improve foundational reading outcomes by 2030.

This brief highlights how warm, interactive, child-led conversations between adults and young children support development and help close early learning gaps. It explains that encouraging curiosity and shifting practitioner behaviour can unlock meaningful learning gains, especially in challenging contexts.

This report explores how early childhood development (ECD) programme benefits change over time. It reviews global and local research on why short-term gains from preschool can diminish (“fade out”) by around Grade 3, and what programme quality, timing, and supportive education systems help sustain long-term learning advantages. It highlights that strong primary schooling and well-designed ECD can reduce fade-out.

This brief argues South Africa should transition from iron-folic acid to Multiple Micronutrient Supplementation (MMS) in antenatal care to improve maternal and newborn health. MMS containing 15 essential micronutrients more effectively reduces low birth weight, preterm birth and stillbirth, especially where anaemia and micronutrient deficiencies are high. It’s cost-effective, offers large economic returns, and aligns with national development goals, urging decisive policy action and integration into routine care.

This policy brief calls for urgent action to ensure all South African children access nutritious food. It proposes affordable food measures, stronger local food systems, better nutrition quality through fortification, and maternal support to reduce stunting, improve growth, and boost lifelong health and economic wellbeing.

This report shows global under‑five mortality has more than halved since 2000, but progress is slowing. In 2023, an estimated 4.8 million children died before age five, mostly from preventable causes. Persisting inequities mean children in low‑resource and fragile settings face far higher risks, underscoring the urgent need for renewed investment and policy action.

This report provides up‑to‑date global data and statistics on childhood immunization, including coverage rates for major vaccines (e.g., DTP3) and tools to explore immunization by country or antigen. It highlights trends, progress, gaps in vaccine delivery, and supports monitoring efforts to reach every child with life‑saving vaccines.

This report presents the latest stillbirth data and evidence from 195 countries. It shows nearly 1.9 million stillbirths in 2023, highlights that many are preventable with quality maternal and childbirth care, reveals major regional disparities, and outlines key interventions to reduce stillbirths and improve counting and bereavement support.

This report found that global child mortality has declined substantially since 1990, yet progress is slowing. In 2024, an estimated 4.9 million children under five died, mainly from preventable causes. Deaths remain concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, highlighting persistent inequalities and urgent investment needs.

This evidence review documents how South Africa’s high levels of alcohol consumption cause widespread harm to children and teens before birth (foetal alcohol spectrum disorders), through unsafe homes, road crashes, violence, depression, risky sex, school dropout and community trauma. It highlights links between binge drinking culture and child/adolescent injury and developmental harm, and calls for evidence‑based actions such as stricter alcohol policies (advertising bans, minimum unit pricing, restricted sales hours), stronger enforcement, community mobilisation, and public health interventions to protect young people.

This youth‑focused guide explains how heavy drinking harms children and teens in South Africa including unsafe homes, accidents, and early alcohol use and what can be done to reduce those harms. It discusses rethinking drinking norms, raising awareness, and supporting healthier choices to protect young lives and futures.

This is a policy brief by Hold My Hand arguing that South Africa should urgently introduce universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) as part of routine maternal and child health services. It highlights that around 6 000 babies are born with hearing loss annually, yet fewer than 10 % are screened at birth, delaying diagnosis and missing critical early intervention windows. The brief frames UNHS as feasible, cost‑effective and essential for equitable early development, calling for integrated screening, trained personnel and strengthened data systems so children can develop language and thrive.

The First South African National Gender-Based Violence Study (2022) is a nationwide baseline survey across all provinces measuring the prevalence, patterns, and drivers of gender-based violence. It examines physical, sexual, emotional, and economic abuse, as well as perpetration, highlighting the role of gender norms and providing evidence to guide policy, prevention strategies, and monitoring of GBV interventions in South Africa

This is a national report which reveals that only about 42 % of children enrolled in early learning programmes are developmentally on track, highlights stark inequalities by income and gender, and shows children not enrolled fare much worse. The findings emphasise deep gaps in early learning, physical growth (including stunting) and social‑emotional functioning, and call for urgent action to improve access, quality, nutrition, and support for families to ensure young children thrive before formal schooling.

This report tracks the wellbeing of South African children under six, showing that post‑COVID‑19 many are more likely to live in poverty, face food insecurity, malnutrition and higher mortality. It presents data on health, nutrition, caregiver support, social protection and early learning to guide policy and action to improve early childhood development.