Wordworks is a South African non-profit organisation that focuses on early language and literacy development in the first eight years of children’s lives.  Since 2005 workworks have:

• Developed innovative, high quality, multilingual user-friendly teaching and learning materials to support early language and literacy learning
• Offered resourced-based training and mentorship for five early language and literacy intervention programmes.
• Worked in under-resourced communities with those adults best positioned to impact on young children’s language and literacy development – parents and caregivers, family and community members, home-visitors, ECD practitioners and Grade R to Grade 3 teachers.
• Collaborated with those who care for, work with and advocate for young children so that they recognise the importance of early language and literacy and support its development in homes, schools and community settings.

Nal’ibali (isiXhosa for “here’s the story”) is South Africa’s reading-for-enjoyment campaign. It makes use of reading and storytelling in home languages as well as English to support children’s literacy learning and school success. It is one of the biggest literacy-based nongovernmental organisations in South Africa. It was initiated in 2012 by the DG Murray Trust and the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA).

Shine Literacy seeks to create more reading opportunities for children in schools and in the greater community, working with schools directly to develop approaches that are relevant, effective and sustainable. Their main focus as an organisation is foundational phase literacy. 

The Western Cape identified the unacceptably low literacy levels in their schools as a cause for major concern, since the literacy levels in South African schools are among the lowest globally. This resulted in the birth of Growsmart, an annual inter-school literacy competition aimed at changing awareness and learning behaviour in the school community and tangibly benefiting previously disadvantaged schools and learners, sponsored by Growthpoint.

• In order to effectively run the competition, Growthpoint engages various stakeholders.
• The winning school receives an iSchool Africa iPad Learning Lab to the value of R 250 000.
• In February 2014, a new element was added to Growsmart which takes the literacy initiative one step further – that of a story writing competition.
• Ongoing monitoring and evaluation take place both during the competition and in the form of long-term intervention at the winning school.

The Volkswagen Community Trust’s Literacy Programme was launched in 2015. To establish what would be required by such a programme, Volkswagen consulted with key non-profit organisations (NPO) in the sector, universities and academics, the Department of Basic Education, parents, teachers, school governing bodies and the community at large.

Using the results and recommendations indicated in the study, Volkswagen has designed and implemented a comprehensive literacy intervention in five Uitenhage primary schools. The goal of the project is to ensure that learners are functionally literate by the time they reach age 10, or grade 3.