Embedded Files
Every child in South Africa deserves the opportunity to thrive physically, cognitively, emotionally, and socially, before starting school. High-quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) creates lasting benefits for both children and communities: it boosts child outcomes, creates new jobs, and enables parents to work. Yet, over one million 3 to 5-year olds still lack access to quality early learning. The conventional, centre-based ECCE models are too capital-intensive to rapidly unlock access in communities that need it.
About the organisation
SmartStart supports women to convert existing assets (their homes and community spaces) into licensed early learning enterprises that follow SmartStart’s evidence-based curriculum. Their model, known as a social franchise, combines training, materials, coaching, compliance support, and peer networks in a single platform. This approach makes quality ECCE affordable, accessible, and community-owned while creating stable livelihoods for franchisees across the country.
Through collaboration with government, funders, and other partners, SmartStart has grown into South Africa’s leading national early learning network, reaching 160,000 children every week through its 15,000 entrepreneurs. Children in SmartStart’s programs demonstrate significant improvements in math, literacy, and fine motor skills. The percentage of children who are “on track” across five developmental domains increased from 45% to 65% in just eight months, while the proportion of children “falling far behind” was nearly halved. SmartStart is a Skoll and Mulago Awardee.
Grace Matlhape
CEO
Ashoka Fellow
Headquarters: South Africa
Geographies: South Africa
Domains:
Education
Journey of Exponential Change
SmartStart came in with a strong, proven franchise model for delivering early learning. But as they began to engage with the scale of the challenge, a key realisation emerged that expanding one organisation alone would not be enough to reach every child who needs it. SmartStart needed to transition from a franchise model with hard edges to an ecosystem enabler.
The Big Quest:
How can we realise quality, affordable early learning for all 3–5-year-old children—especially those excluded?
They aim to reach ~1 million children across South Africa by 2030, and beyond. As a first step toward this, SmartStart is prototyping ways to make the assets in its delivery model more widely accessible. This includes building out its tech infrastructure to support a distributed network of early learning providers. This infrastructure aims to enable practitioners to set up and run early learning programmes in every type of community, leveraging both tools and training, and support and oversight structures in a seamless system that enables impact to scale beyond a single organisation’s footprint. This work is being taken forward in partnership with the BanaPele Blueprint, contributing to broader, ecosystem-wide solution-building for early learning.
Know More
Podcast
Grace Matlhape (SmartStart South Africa) | Preeti Sunderajan (C4EC) | Siddhartha Menon
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