Thanks to our dedicated Donor, The Jim Joel Fund, we are able to assist 80 Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centre’s with a crucial injection of storybooks and educational toys, puzzles and posters. The 80 ECD Centre’s are in Provinces throughout the country, namely; Free State, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Northern Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

All of these ECD Centre’s are affiliated to and are currently receiving training from 18 ECD Training Centre’s, but they do not have the necessary resources to implement what they have learnt when returning to their classroom.

The 18 ECD Training Centre’s all form part of the highly esteemed Ntataise Network where they are constantly receiving guidance and training around the current trends in the early childhood development sector in South Africa and globally.

Ntataise [meaning to lead a young child by the hand] is an independent, not-for-profit organisation founded in South Africa in 1980. The Network’s main objective is to help women in disadvantaged rural communities to gain the knowledge and skills needed to establish and sustain ECD programmes.

For this project, each of the 80 ECD Centre’s will receive a plastic box containing 30 storybooks in the children’s home language that varies from Zulu, Sesotho, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Setswana, Afrikaans to Siswati and Xitsonga and a few English storybooks to further assist with the children’s language development. Also contained in the plastic box will be ±5 educational resources that will be used by the Practitioner to assist with the child’s cognitive development and nurture their motor skills and cognitive development through play.

Through the partnerships we’ve established with the Jim Joel Fund, the Ntataise Network and the 18 ECD Training Centre’s, we will be able to assist approximately 5 341 children throughout the country. This joint effort will allow the Practitioners of the 80 ECD Centre’s to not only receive training to give children the most relevant form of early childhood development, but will also provide the Practitioners with a crucial injection of resources to implement what they have learnt during their training.

In addition, this collective venture will also ensure that, because of the training carried out by the Training Centre’s,  the Practitioners will be able to use the resources donated by Biblionef to its full potential which will ultimately give the 5 341 children the best possible start to early childhood development.

Give them books, Open up their world!