South Africa Tracks Early Learning for 1 Million Kids

Sonja Giese spent over 30 years watching South African children fall through the cracks because no one was measuring what mattered most: how well the youngest learners were actually developing.

In 2022, she helped launch something that had never been done before. The Thrive by Five Index became the largest survey of preschool outcomes ever attempted in South Africa, measuring how children aged four to five were developing across all nine provinces.

The project required field workers to knock on over 20,000 doors across the country. They interviewed parents, assessed children, and observed early learning programs to create a complete picture of early childhood development nationwide.

Giese, who founded DataDrive2030 to coordinate the survey, worried educators might feel criticized by the results. Instead, they felt seen. "They felt validated. They felt like their work was important," she said.

The index measures whether children are developmentally on track in key areas before they start school. The Department of Basic Education now leads the survey every three years, with the 2024 survey providing fresh data to guide decisions.

The impact goes beyond numbers on a page. Before the index existed, the first major data point in education was high school graduation. That meant investment poured in right before students took final exams, not when they were three or four years old.

Now organizations can see exactly where early intervention makes a difference. "If your data point is at the age of four, people can say, 'Okay, if I put money into this, I should see a change immediately,'" Giese explained.

The Ripple Effect

The survey results are packaged so everyone can use them. Academic researchers, government officials, business leaders, and individual teachers at early learning centers all have access to the same information.

DataDrive2030 also created affordable tools that let individual ECD centers measure their own progress. If organizations cannot afford the tools, Giese raises funds to provide them for free.

The work builds on lessons Giese learned coordinating HIV/AIDS programs at the University of Cape Town in the early 2000s. She discovered that making invisible populations visible requires telling their story through both numbers and lived experiences.

Her time at the NGO Ilifa Labantwana taught her another crucial lesson: good tools only work when they fit into existing government systems. The Thrive by Five Index was designed from the start to integrate with how departments already operate.

The goal was never to promote any single organization's approach. "It's about how collectively, as a country, we can shift the needle," Giese said.

Young children across South Africa now have something they never had before: a national system that tracks their progress and demands investment in their future.