BUILDING BUZZING BRAINS
By age five, a child’s brain reaches 90% of its adult size, and in the first few years of life, children form about 50% more neural connections than adults will have. This explosive networking lays the foundation for cognitive development that continues into early adulthood, constantly being pruned and remoulded, and shaping how someone learns about, makes sense of and behaves in their world.
This is why early childhood development is vitally important for building thriving minds. Yet data shows that only about two-thirds (68%) of 3–5-year-olds in South Africa attend a group learning programme of some kind – which means about one in three children may be missing out on the cognitive stimulation they need during these early years. Data shows that about 40% of South Africa’s early learning programmes (ELPs) are in rural areas, often run by women who make do with few resources and little support. Moreover, the majority of ELP providers in the country have to charge parents and caregivers monthly fees to run their centres; of the roughly R14 billion families spent on ELP fees in 2020, more than a quarter – R3.7 billion – was paid by the poorest 60% of households.
DGMT believes a digital work management tool called the ECD Connect app can help ELP providers to thrive, so they can give children the best possible start. Just as neural connections – built through constant ‘serve-and-return’ interactions –amplify the brain’s power, the potential of ECD practitioners could be unlocked through a dynamic network that connects them to one another and to rich learning resources.
MAKING CONNECTIONS THAT SHAPE BRIGHT MINDS
A newborn baby’s brain has about 100 billion nerve cells – the result of having grown, on average, by around 250 000 cells per minute during the course of a pregnancy.1 This staggering number becomes even more mind-boggling when the connections between cells are considered: scientists estimate that there are a thousand times more neural connections in the brain at birth than neurons themselves.2 When you consider the information-processing power of these trillions of neural connections, it’s hard not to marvel at each child’s potential to develop a bright and capable mind.
Sensory pathways – specifically for vision and hearing –develop rapidly in the first year of life, peaking at around six months of age.3 At the same time, the circuits underlying language skills also develop, but only reach their highest rate of development between seven and 10 months of age, shortly after the peak of sensory connections development. Between years one and five, the pace at which connections form to support functions like decision-making, problem solving, memory and planning – essential for learning and thinking tasks – is at its highest.
Yet it’s not only the bewildering proliferation of nerve cells and neural connections in the young brain that determines a child’s cognitive ability, but also the way these circuits are shaped and refined. A process of pruning – strengthening some neural branches and letting unnecessary or inefficient ones wither, much like shaping a shrub – is a natural part of building smart minds.
Serve-and-return relationships are a big part of this developmental process.4 Young children naturally seek interaction through babbling and making facial expressions and gestures, and when caregivers or other adults respond to those actions – in other words, “returning” what the child “served” – it creates stimulating feedback that strengthens brain architecture and elicits further interaction.
This is why ECD is so important for building thriving minds. Yet data shows that only about two-thirds (68%) of 3–5-yearolds in South Africa attended a group learning programme of some kind in 2022.5 This total was made up of 45% of children attending ECD centres, crèches or playgroups and 23% enrolled in primary school (typically Grade R).
The numbers suggest that one out of every three children may miss out on optimal opportunities for cognitive development that could otherwise set them up for a bright future. Moreover, the 2021 ECD census6 showed that three-quarters of ELPs in South Africa were in low-income settings. They typically have to make do with few resources, and only about one in three were registered with the social development department and thus able to get state subsidies.7
1 Ackerman, S. The development and shaping of the brain. In: Ackerman, S., Discovering the Brain. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 1992. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234146/
2 Ibid.
3 Center on the Developing Child. In brief: The science of early childhood development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University; 2007. Available at: https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/inbriefs/inbrief-science-of-ecd/
4 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Young children develop in an environment of relationships. Working Paper No. 1. 2004. Available at: http://www.developingchild.net
5 Hall, K., et al. South African Early Childhood Review 2024. Cape Town: Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town and Ilifa Labantwana; 2024. Available at: https://ilifalabantwana.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SA-early-childhoodreview-2024-FINAL.pdf
6 Department of Basic Education. ECD Census 2021: Report. Pretoria: Department of Basic Education; 2022. Available at: https://datadrive2030.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ecdc-2021-report.pdf
7 At the time of the 2021 survey, support for ECD was a function of the Department of Social Development. The Department of Basic Education took over the portfolio in 2022.
NUMBERS TO KNOW
A newborn baby has about 100 billion brain cells.
During the course of a mom’s pregnancy, her child’s brain grows, on average, by 250 000 nerve cells per minute.9
A two-year-old’s brain has 50% more neural connections than an adult brain.10
By age five, a child’s brain has reached 90% of its adult size.11
USING TECH TO HELP CLOSE THE GAP
This is where ECD Connect,12 a project partly funded by DGMT,13 fits in. The ECD Connect team developed a suite of online tools to help improve access to quality early learning, by making it easy for ECD practitioners and principals to:
keep track of their lesson plans, and children’s attendance and development record their crèche’s income and expenses access training and resources connect with other ECD practitioners.
By helping practitioners keep records and making admin easy, ECD Connect can facilitate data-driven decisions about and for their classes and businesses. For example, a user can track attendance at their centre, build a record of how children progress, log income and expenses, and store receipts or payment notifications for their records. It’s a stepwise way to move towards professionalising small, independent crèches in low-income settings. In turn, it can encourage more parents to enrol their children in ELPs, and so help more children build a solid foundation that will prepare them for formal schooling.
“Keeping track of things at a crèche can be a game changer in the early learning landscape, because it can help practitioners to make better decisions later,” explains Peter Schütte, the project’s team lead. “But for most of the centres in our target market, it’s really difficult.”
- Peter Schütte, project lead of ECD Connect
8 Ackerman, S. The development and shaping of the brain. In: Ackerman, S., Discovering the Brain. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 1992. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234146/
9 Ibid.
10 Society for Neuroscience. n.d. Brain facts: A primer on the brain and nervous system. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience. Available at: https://www.brainfacts.org/the-brain-facts-book
11 Ibid.
12 ECD Connect. Available at: https://ecdconnect.org.za/
13 DGMT. ECD Connect. Available at: https://dgmt.co.za/project/ecd-connect/
It’s a small step that can help to bring about big change. “I think of it as a ladder,” says Peter Schütte, the project’s team lead. “To get to the top, you have to start on the first rung. ECD Connect is there to help practitioners take that first step.”
To create a digital tool that would be truly useful, the team settled on building an app that would be able to work both on- and offline, require little data, be easy to navigate and be able to work in a browser, independent of the type of device being used.
All an independent ECD practitioner needs to get going is the link to the app and a device that can connect to the internet, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop or even a desktop computer. “The app was designed with the least-resourced ECD practitioners in mind, which is uncommon given the incentives at play in a typical market economy. It’s not just another app you download from the app store,” explains Schütte.
He adds: “The choice of this design was intentional: to do a few simple things well.”
ECD CONNECT IS A SUITE OF APPS SUPPORTED BY A
SINGLE CODE BASE
ECD practitioners and principals are primarily using the free, open-access version of the ECD Connect app, which went live in April 2025.14 It has a standardised set of functions, distilled into modules for classroom management, business management, provider connection, and access to training materials.
But this wasn’t the first version of the app to be developed; in fact, it was the culmination of related developments that all use the same core code base.
Two of these are custom-made versions for other DGMTsupported projects working in the ECD space,15 namely Funda App16 for SmartStart and CHW Connect17 for Grow Great.
In addition, a white-label platform, called ECD Connect Partner, was developed for other research and training organisations, which they could rebrand with their own logos and colouring. This is currently used by Khululeka,18 Ntataise19 and True North,20 all non-profit organisations working in marginalised communities, to advance access to quality ECD.
Teaming up with SmartStart and Grow Great at an earlier stage allowed the team to leverage complementary relationships within the DGMT network to gather valuable user data and insight – and provided an opportune training ground. For example, when SmartStart sought a streamlined, time-efficient way for its large network of early learning providers to manage classroom and business admin, the Funda App offered an opportunity to trial the concept with an established user base.
14 To download the app, go to: app.ecdconnect.co.za
The tool was designed specifically for ECD practitioners in low-income settings. Based on what typical users in this demographic told field workers during extensive predesign interviews, the team realised that the key pain points that would have to be solved included:
practitioners experiencing a high administrative load, often because of double reporting
practitioners feeling isolated from peers and undervalued in their communities
a lack of feedback and support
difficulty in accessing teaching resources in languages other than English
complicated requirements for getting access to funding (where applicable).
15 For more about SmartStart and Grow Great, see: https://smartstart.org.za/ and https://www.growgreat.co.za/
16 See: https://learn.smartstart.org.za/courses/funda/
17 Grow Great. 2023. Annual report. Available at: https://www.growgreat.co.za/wpcontent/uploads/2024/05/GROW-GREAT-ANNUAL-REPORT-2023-final-DIGITAL.pdf
18 See: https://khululeka.org.za/
19 See: https://www.ntataise.org/
20 See: https://www.true-north.co.za/
“Ingikhiphe
i stress [it has removed my stress], no more paperwork, ngiyithandela ukuthi it works everywhere [I like that it works everywhere]. I can track my spending, and my income.”
–
SmartStarter from Gauteng
CHW Connect for Grow Great followed. Grow Great focuses on child and maternal health in the first 1 000 days of a child’s life. Similar to SmartStart, Grow Great supports a large network of users – community health workers, in this case –who needed an efficient and simple way to monitor their clients and provide feedback, connect with others in their communities and access learning content. This custom build helped the ECD Connect team to refine their product further.
A SIMPLE START TO THE ECD CONNECT APP
Here are five quick things to know about the app:
It’s a digital tool to help ECD practitioners manage their workload.
It runs in a browser and so can work on any internet-connected device – from a smartphone to a desktop computer.
“Files
go missing all the time –
you’ll
misplace them. But you can’t misplace them on the app.”
– Grow Great Champion, Nkomazi
It’s simple to use and offers four modules of functionality: one for classroom management, one for business management, one for accessing training materials and one for connecting with other practitioners.
It takes up little storage space and requires little data.
The open-access version is free to any ECD practitioner in South Africa.
THE FIRST FIVE YEARS
Just like the first five years of a child’s life are an important window to set them up for a bright future, so too were the first five years of the development of ECD Connect.
Project conceived and application for initial funding
Field
and
lockdown because of COVID-19 pandemic
Focusing on understanding the target market’s needs upfront, and allowing them to inform the design process, was invaluable, notes Kim Tichmann, ECD Connect’s data and product strategy lead. “We met with 148 potential users during our design phase and held 18 usability testing sessions to refine flows and layouts,” she explains. Each session helped to pinpoint another tweak that would make navigation and use easier, until the final layout was settled and could be locked down for development.
Just as the design was an iterative process, so too were the early trials and pilot phases, with data from each step being used for quality control and to shape the tool’s functionality on the back end. As a result, formally launching the app was a fairly painless process, despite some “inevitable glitches in the beginning”, notes Schütte.
FIVE YEARS AND BEYOND
With the white-label and open-access platforms live, “this year is very much about learning”, says Schütte. “Next year is for scaling.” The aim, says the team, is to get 1 000 people signed up by the end of 2025, and 12 500 by the end of 2026.
It’s an ambitious goal, but one they think can be achieved –especially considering the user base the white-label partners have access to.
A big part of getting more users on board will be expanding training sessions. So far, the team has run roadshows in the North West, the Northern Cape and also in urban settlements such as Langa, Manenberg and Masiphumelele in the Western Cape.
“As a committee member or a board member of an ECD [centre], you’ll be able to trace the progress of a school … and you can actually advance our kids. It’s easy, it’s accessible and it will take you step by step.”
– Robert Gunda, Ezibeleni Creche, Upington
In her role, Tichmann can see how the app is being used in real time – and the data gives her valuable insight into what works and where small tweaks or fixes are needed: “I can see from the patterns in user data when something isn’t working as intended. Of course, it’s disappointing in the moment, but at this stage it’s all about learning. I get excited by what the data reveals: how people are using the tool, where they’re getting stuck, and what that means for how we improve ECD Connect.”
These workshops typically last around two hours, explains Justin Shanks, who’s in charge of stakeholder engagement for ECD Connect. No one session is the same, though: sometimes there are more than 100 people at an event, sometimes fewer than 10.
“We learn as we go,” he says. “Something we realised early on from these workshops is that digital literacy levels vary markedly in each group and this can be a big hurdle if you haven’t planned accordingly. In our first few sessions, we covered far less than we set out to.”
Now the team focuses on three things, in line with the project’s philosophy of doing simple things well. These are: to get attendees signed up on the app; helping them to add the app on their device’s home screen; and walking them through using the app’s basic functions.
But in-person training is expensive and so the project team is also experimenting with using other channels, such as YouTube videos,21 WhatsApp messages and SMS campaigns, to get the word out and drive up numbers.
Part of the team’s exploration of usage patterns this year is to look at ways to use reverse billing to cover users’ data costs. “We can see from the user statistics that not being able to buy data is a barrier to people actually using the app – it doesn’t matter how simple the functionality or lightweight the application is,” says Tichmann. It’s something the team has also learnt from their collaboration with Grow Great and SmartStart, both of which have experienced similar challenges and needed to find ways to fund their users’ data costs.
21 See: https://www.youtube.com/@ECDConnect
TURNING NUMBERS INTO KNOWLEDGE
One of the strengths of ECD Connect is that because the backend architecture of the app allows for data to be collected on usage patterns, it can offer a real-world window into what’s happening in ECD classrooms in South Africa.
“The data gives us an early look into things like how much income people are making [from their centres], what they’re spending money on, how many children are in a class, what activities they’re accessing, and so on. It’s not something you can get anywhere else, and with information like this, it’s something an organisation or a donor or a government can respond to, to drive real change,” says Tichmann.
“Of course, it depends on us actually being able to roll out to a lot of people. It depends on them using it. It depends on us making updates and doing research,” she adds, which is why sustained funding for the next phase of the project is crucial.
THE WHITE-LABEL PLATFORM, AFTER BEING LIVE FOR EIGHT MONTHS22
189 practitioners signed up across three organisations
417 children registered
508 attendance registers saved
19 child progress assessments completed
4 child progress reports for caregivers generated
THE OPEN-ACCESS APP, AFTER BEING LIVE FOR JUST OVER TWO MONTHS23
708 practitioners signed up
232 children registered
124 attendance registers saved
102 themes planned (a theme is a set of lesson plans covering 20 school days)
60 child progress assessments completed
57 child progress reports for caregivers generated
85 practitioners joined the ECD Heroes community on the app
ECD CONNECT: CUMULATIVE USER GROWTH
LESSONS LEARNT
Introducing a tech tool into the market is no easy feat, and definitely a steep learning curve. Here are five take-home lessons:
START SMALL
When it comes to developing an app, design something small that works end to end – even if it’s just one function. “Whatever you have in mind, make it smaller,” advises Tichmann. “We thought we scoped something really basic – what the industry calls a minimum viable product – but actually we had thought up a dream product,” she laughs.
GOING FROM SPEC TO TECH IS HARD
Something that sounds easy to do in words can be hard in code, says Tichmann. That’s because in digital language every instruction is based on calculations and logical relationships. “You have to be very exact in defining the rules for how a
calculation should run – and then test, retest and test again to make sure a function does exactly what you planned it to do.”
3
DO SIMPLE THINGS REALLY WELL
Digital literacy is not the same for everyone. Having an app that’s informed by user needs and a simple interface that’s easy to navigate can go a long way to getting sign-ups to scale.
4
BE WELL CONNECTED
Signing up users for an online app can live or die by the strength of your Wi-Fi connection, says Schütte. “Having insufficient connectivity at a training session can really kill a vibe.”
5
BE PREPARED TO WEAR MANY HATS
At a tech start-up, everyone has to do a little of everything. “Sometimes you wear one hat, sometimes you share a hat with someone else, sometimes we pass the hat around,” says Shanks. “Being all-in is the only way to stay afloat.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
With both the white-label and open-access versions having gone live in the past year, the focus from here on in is to greatly increase usage and so help support all ECD practitioners to give children the early-learning start they need to build buzzing brains.
A big part of increasing the number of active users will be finding a way to reverse bill data costs and to roll out training at scale, which will require some innovative approaches. Building on the large user base established through SmartStart and Grow Great, expanding ECD Connect’s reach will generate robust data on usage patterns and highlight any technical improvements needed.
More importantly, insights into how ECD practitioners run their centres day to day can inform how the government plans, monitors and – crucially – invests in ECD in South Africa. Growing the user base on a platform like ECD Connect can help build a data ecosystem that equips policymakers to make impactful decisions, giving every child the chance to build a bright future.
Just like the pruning and moulding of a child’s neural network, ECD Connect will also adapt and change as it grows. One of its risks is that it becomes too distant from its site of application, from the hands of ECD practitioners themselves. Discussions are already underway to integrate its work more fully into the ongoing development of service delivery platforms that are committed to open networks.
This is the learning experience of:
This brief was written by Linda Pretorius and edited by Rahima Essop, with contributions from the ECD Connect team.