JOHANNESBURG, Gauteng — With the November 4 local government elections fast approaching, early childhood development (ECD) practitioners in Johannesburg are demanding that political parties prioritize the city’s youngest and most vulnerable residents. Currently, approximately 5,900 ECD programmes across Gauteng remain unregistered, leaving thousands of centres struggling with severe water shortages, costly municipal compliance requirements, and crippling registration delays.
Tshepo Mantje, Senior ECD Coordinator at the Equality Collective and a leading voice for the Real Reform ECD movement, emphasized that while the National Departments of Basic Education and Health play significant roles, local government has been largely forgotten in the ECD sector.
“Local government plays a massive role particularly in ensuring that ECD centres are able to register and unlock the subsidy that they need to support holistic and quality ECD services,” Mantje explained. However, without basic municipal support, centres in Johannesburg and across the country are finding it impossible to formalize their operations.
The Registration Bottleneck and Subsidy Trap
The registration hurdles are currently preventing centres from accessing a R10 billion subsidy allocated by the National Treasury to the Department of Basic Education. The current registration model utilizes a tiered system of bronze, silver, and gold to recognize that practitioners cannot achieve compliance all at once.
While achieving bronze registration through self-assessment has been relatively successful, progressing to silver requires an environmental health inspection conducted by the municipality. In Johannesburg, these inspections are severely delayed due to low capacity and poor prioritization.
“There is little to no capacity in terms of getting them to happen, but also little prioritization,” Mantje noted, adding that some practitioners are waiting up to two years for certification. Without this silver certification, centres cannot access the vital subsidies needed to improve their services, trapping them in a cycle of underfunding.
Safety Concerns and Accountability
This bureaucratic bottleneck also creates severe safety and accountability risks. Mantje highlighted the dangers of unregistered centres operating in the shadows without municipal oversight.
“We’ve had instances around the city of Johannesburg where in Mayfair a couple of years ago there was a fire at an ECD centre that was unregistered. We’ve had another incident where a bookshelf fell on a child at a centre that was unregistered,” Mantje stated. “This is because no one knows where these centres are [or] how they are operating.”
Five Demands for the City of Johannesburg
In response to political leaders making sweeping remarks without addressing specific community needs, practitioners have drafted a City of Johannesburg ECD manifesto. The movement has presented mayoral candidates with five critical demands:
- Reliable Access to Water: Practitioners care for tens to hundreds of children daily. Consistent water access is essential for hygiene, changing diapers, and food preparation.
- Prioritized Environmental Health Inspections: Expediting municipal certifications to allow centres to unlock vital subsidies and improve their offerings.
- Simplified Land Use and Rezoning: Streamlining the complex, multi-step process for practitioners who operate centres out of their own residential homes.
- A One-Stop Registration Shop: Eliminating fragmented bureaucracy that forces practitioners to spend hundreds of rands on taxi fare traveling between scattered municipal offices.
- Reduced Fees and Fines: Shifting from a punitive approach to a supportive one. Currently, unregistered practitioners are being fined up to R5,000 for infrastructures and compliance issues that the municipality has failed to help them resolve.
As political parties, including the ANC, campaign ahead of the elections, the Real Reform ECD movement insists that the future of the province depends on the conditions of its early childhood centres.
“When we talk about the kind of future we want for Johannesburg, that future is sitting in an early childhood development centre right now,” Mantje concluded. “The conditions of that centre give us a prediction of what the condition of Johannesburg will be in the future.”
