South African NGOs coming together for early literacy development

March 2022

Since its initial implementation in 2021, Yizani Sifunde has reached more than 1,400 children. Early childhood development centres in South Africa have received resources from our classroom-based early childhood literacy program for pre-Grade R, Little Stars, to use in their classrooms.

Nal’ibali, BookDash, and Wordworks have partnered in the Yizani Sifunde project, funded by Liberty Community Trust, which focuses on improving early literacy in the Eastern Cape. The project has been working in communities from East London, Sterkstroom, Molteno and Burgerdorp. The consortium aims at strengthening early literacy development in the early childhood development (ECD) sector.

Since the initial implementation in 2021, Yizani Sifunde has reached over 1400 children. ECD centres have received resources from our classroom-based programme for pre Grade R, Little Stars, to implement in the classroom. Children have also received storybooks from BookDash in their home language to take home and read with family, as can be seen in frame 1. This has also encouraged more practitioners, parents and caregivers to start reading stories to young children, highlighting the importance of reading in their home language.

Wordworks trainers visited ECD centres in Burgersdorp on the 17th of May. The Practitioners were trained on the Little Stars programme that includes story-telling.

Practitioners completed Little Stars reading activities with the children (frame 2). Practitioners also read Little Stars stories to the children using sequence cards(frame 3). A Nal’ibali “Story Sparker ” from Burgersdorp also participated in the session, and read a story to the children (frame 4).

The Yizani Sifunde implementing team really enjoyed the sessions and were encouraged by the enthusiasm of the children and the practitioners! (frame 5)

To find out more about Nal’ibali and BookDash, please visit the links below: