The Yizani Sifunde (come let’s read) early childhood literacy project exemplifies how collaborative social development efforts can leverage the strengths of partner non-profit organisations (NPOs) to deliver thoughtfully structured, comprehensive and creative strategic interventions.
Funded by Liberty Community Trust (LCT), Yizani Sifunde combines the shared goal and unique talents of literacy-focused NPOs Book Dash, Nal’ibali and Wordworks to address literacy challenges in the Eastern Cape. The programme, now in its third year of implementation, supports early childhood development (ECD) centres, teachers, parents and the wider community to ignite a love of reading, laying the critical foundations for literacy.
Poor literacy continues to challenge South African children. Research shows that 78% of grade 4 pupils cannot understand what they are reading and close to one-third of children from rural areas are functionally illiterate. Without intervention, most of these children will leave the school system without the skills they need to succeed in life, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
Yizani Sifunde takes a holistic perspective of the literacy problem, applying multiple strategic interventions to address this issue.
ECD practitioner training and beyond
Reading and story sharing play an important role in developing children’s language skills. These create the language foundations for learning to read and write, and support healthy cognitive and emotional development. Sparking children’s interest in reading starts with adults. Yizani Sifunde helps ECD practitioners, caregivers and communities to understand and appreciate the value of reading for their children’s future educational success and reawaken their own love of stories.
NPO partner Wordworks, together with their local partners ITEC in East London and Khululeka in Queenstown, provides regular training and support to ECD practitioners to deliver the Little Stars literacy programme. This resource-based programme, which was developed by Wordworks, is designed to strengthen language and emergent literacy in pre-grade R classrooms. Age-appropriate stories form the basis of themed frameworks with guided activities, interactions and conversations.
ECD practitioners are also capacitated to run workshops to sensitise parents and caregivers to the value of reading to and engaging with their children at home. Wordworks representative Magali von Blottnitz says this has gone a long way towards challenging out-of-date ideas about young children and their ability to learn.
“We have some beautiful stories of how parents’ awareness and perceptions of their children’s learning abilities and needs have changed through this engagement.”
Data shows that parents play more and have more positive interactions with their children after attending the workshops.
Since Yizani Sifunde’s inception, Wordworks has trained 15 trainers to support 127 ECD centres. Around 130 ECD practitioners have been trained to deliver the Little Stars programme, reaching nearly 3 000 children. Approximately 450 caregivers have participated in parent workshops.
A book in the hand is worth … a headstart in life
Book ownership is key to the Yizani Sifunde project design. Book Dash spokesperson Julia Norrish explains how giving young children access to their own high-quality, relevant books is strongly associated with positive behavioural, educational and socio-emotional development. “Global and local research studies indicate that children who own books before school have a measurable headstart in key developmental areas and that this continues into school and later in life.”
“In South Africa, our challenge is the shortage of children’s stories written in African languages.”
Nal’ibali Head of Programmes Mpho Ramasodi
However, book ownership is at critically low levels in South Africa, particularly in impoverished communities. About 70% of South African children under 10 do not have any books at home. Since book ownerships is also closely linked to literacy, one of the project’s key interventions is to disseminate books to children in its target area.
Book Dash creates, translates and provides the books for the Yizani Sifunde project, overseeing the distribution plans for 80 000 to 100 000 books per year. To date the NPO has provided 250 000 books to children in the target communities. It has created 30 new open-licensed storybooks, with 20 more to come and translated 40 of its titles to isiXhosa, with 30 more planned for 2024.
For the love of stories
Nal’ibali Head of Programmes Mpho Ramasodi explains that reading in one’s mother tongue is important for contextual understanding and vocabulary building.
“In South Africa, our challenge is the shortage of children’s stories written in African languages. As a result, children’s language formation is compromised and by the time they get to intermediate phase in school it is already too late to bridge the gap.”
She adds that the absence of books written in their mother tongue limits children’s choices and can discourage them from reading when they struggle to understand or pronounce words written in another language. “Making books available in their mother tongue increases the chances that children will grab a book to read because the titles already speak to existing knowledge, and in that way they easily fall in love with the stories.”
Nal’ibali’s contribution to the Yizani Sifunde Project is to grow appreciation for reading at a community level. Story Sparkers and Literacy Mentors conduct community activations to establish and facilitate extramural reading clubs. Forty functional reading clubs currently reach 597 children.
Nal’ibali also distributes reading material in the form of newspaper supplements to 1 512 children in ECD centres every month for ten months a year and provides stories for digital platforms, print and community radio.
“The project has brought about positive changes; we now see children enjoying reading because they can easily access books … and parents beginning to understand the importance of encouraging the use of their own language when telling stories or reading to their children,” comments Ramasodi.
Collaborations that improve outcomes
CSI Lead Specialist Nomaxabiso Matjila says that collaboration came about as part of the trust’s desire to invest in foundation phase education projects that improve the learning outcomes of young people in South Africa and enable sustainable economic inclusion.
Having assessed the individual proposals from Book Dash, Nal’ibali and Wordworks, LCT recognised the potential value of their respective approaches and contributions if combined in a single project. “We asked them to propose a joint project that would deliver a more holistic approach to the problem we were trying to solve and Yizani Sifunde is the result.”
Having completed its three-year plan, Matjila says the programme will spend the next year consolidating its efforts and drawing lessons and reflections from an ongoing external evaluation to assess its impact. This will inform potential future project iterations and possible rollout to other provinces.
Navigating collaborative partnerships to success
Collaborative efforts like Yizani Sifunde can be a resounding success, but unlocking that success requires conscious consideration, time and resources to work on the collaborative process itself.
The NGO partners highlighted some of the project challenges that can arise from data system incompatibility, duplication of efforts, staff turnover and inefficiencies that stem from working across multiple teams, cultures, calendars and systems.
Von Blottnitz explains that incompatible data systems presented a challenge for the project’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E), until the partners agreed on a single data environment and designed tailored tools to improve it. “We had to invest a lot in making sure that the team on the ground knew how to use the tools and then found ways to feed back the collected data into the various partners’ working environments. This made things much more effective and efficient.”
A year into the project, a collaboration monitoring process set out to assess and address the project’s teething pains. Team members from all partner organisations were interviewed and their feedback was documented into themes that the partners workshopped together to resolve. “Improving the interfaces between the different organisations has been a game-changer. The collaboration process has been much smoother as a result.”
“Global and local research studies indicate that children who own books before school have a measurable headstart in key developmental areas.”
Book Dash spokesperson Julia Norrish
Norrish highlights the importance of good communication between the partners to ensure mutual input and a shared vision. She points out the importance of clearly defined upfront roles and areas of responsibility as well as the value of including operations and finance staff from the different organisations in certain decisions to avoid duplication of efforts.
“Each organisation has its own style or approach in terms of how they work but it is important to discuss these if there is a possibility that the approach affects the success of the project,” adds Ramasodi. She says that subcommittees within the project have helped to resolve day-to-day operational and M&E issues.
The partners identified the qualities that have contributed to Yizani Sifunde’s collaborative success as: shared commitment to the project’s purpose, trust in the respective partners and respect for their roles, transparency related to shared achievements and internal challenges, and accountability to the established subcommittees.
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Source: The original version of this article was published in the Trialogue Business in Society Handbook 2023 (26th edition).