Real Reform for ECD commends the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) commitment to improving access to nutrition for young children. This is an important step towards addressing the crisis of hunger and malnutrition affecting one in four children under five years in South Africa.
We call for and support a national ECD nutrition programme that addresses malnutrition and stunting in young children, and are encouraged to see it as a high priority on the DBE’s agenda. However, we are concerned that funds allocated for designing and piloting early nutrition interventions have been subsumed into a 10 year, R10 billion a year national school nutrition programme (NSNP) “modernisation” tender, which has been rightly flagged by Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube as “high risk”.
As the Minister reviews the tender – which seeks to outsource management of the entire NSNP and a new national early nutrition programme to a single centralised managing agent – we are left with more questions than answers about the department’s approach to improving nutrition at about 42 000 ECD centres across the country.
According to the tender’s invitation to bid, the proposed ECD nutrition programme aims to reach “120 000 children over 264 feeding days per annum at ECD centres”. This is only 8% of the 1.5 million children from low-income families who currently attend an ECD programme. This number could be acceptable for a pilot exercise, but is far too low to be the total extent of the DBE’s nutrition support to 0-5 year olds, as envisioned in the tender.
In addition, there is no mention of a pilot phase in which the department tests approaches to understand the complexity of supporting nutrition at ECD programmes. The DBE was allocated R197 million by the National Treasury in 2024/25 precisely for this purpose–a pilot ECD nutrition programme–and we implore the DBE to draw on the expertise of all stakeholders in meaningfully undertaking this exercise.
In 2023, we launched the Right to Nutrition campaign which called on the DBE to provide nutrition support to all eligible children (those receiving the Child Support Grant) attending an ECD programme, regardless of whether the programme was registered or not. The campaign was based on three research papers that explored; 1) the right to nutrition and the state’s Constitutional obligation to fulfil this right, 2) what constitutes adequate nutrition and 3) various implementation models, and costing, of a national ECD nutrition programme.
Our research concluded that schools and ECD centres are different in ways that have implications for implementation and the approach cannot simply be a copy paste of the schools nutrition programme. There also needed to be a varied approach for reaching children at unregistered ECD programmes, ensuring that the most vulnerable children who stand the most to gain from nutrition support are not excluded.
We recommended that the DBE remove ECD from the disputed NSNP tender and instead commit to a transparent pilot process that tests a dual implementation approach using two models – direct transfers, and provincial procurement and delivery. All registered centres should receive a direct transfer of the ECD subsidy, which should be increased.
Unregistered centres should use two variations of provincial procurement and delivery:
- In provinces where the Provincial Education Department (PED) provides food/meals directly to schools under the NSNP, PEDs should use existing NSNP service providers to also procure and deliver food/meals to nearby unregistered ECD programmes.
- In provinces where the PED transfers money directly to schools under the NSNP, the PED should appoint and contract new commercial service providers or non-governmental organisations as strategic implementing partners, to procure and deliver food/meals to unregistered ECD programmes.
For registered ECD programmes, we believe nutrition can be provided through access to the per child per day subsidy. However, this subsidy needs to be expanded to reach all eligible children attending registered ECD programmes. Good quality nutrition also requires appropriate funding, and ECD programmes can provide good quality nutrition if the value of the subsidy increases from the current meagre R17 per child per day to R46 per child per day by 2029.
We call on the DBE to engage with all stakeholders and publish clear, transparent, and robust plans for piloting and scaling up nutrition support for young children at registered and unregistered ECD programmes across the country.
