Julie Hay

What does your company do?

Singakwenza, meaning “We can do it!”, is a non-profit organization which focuses on Early Childhood Education. With an emphasis on long-term sustainability, we provide grassroots training for practitioners, parents and caregivers in poor communities to enable them to provide fun, educational activities for their vulnerable preschool children. These activities develop, through play, the foundational skills for learning, supported by educational resources that are handmade solely from recycling. Once the adults have been trained to provide daily stimulation for their young children, they are able to make all their own resources using household packaging that usually ends up in landfill, rivers and the ocean. Singakwenza believes strongly in empowering women, especially those practitioners who show enthusiasm, initiative and commitment. Our program provides free training and mentorship to practitioners on-site at their crèches and helps to transform them from babysitters to facilitators who understand, and can implement, purposeful play activities every day. Our trainers spend one day a week in each crèche, teaching and mentoring practitioners on how to educate the children in their care using resources made from recycling. These trainers work with their practitioners every week for a minimum of two years, guiding, modelling and encouraging them towards a daily structured and educational program that is fun and engaging. We encourage practitioners to grow their crèches not only into centres where every child has the opportunity to develop their potential, but also into sustainable businesses so that they can continue independently once we leave. We currently have 8 Singakwenza trainers working in 38 community creches, teaching 69 practitioners how to provide purposeful play for the 1,138 preschool children in their care. To ensure that no children are disadvantaged by developmental delays, we employ 2 Occupational Therapists (OTs) who regularly visit all the crèches Singakwenza supports, providing free occupational therapy advice to practitioners, learners and parents. The OTs ensures that the practitioners understand the process to follow when they suspect that there may be an issue that could interfere with a child’s ability to learn. They teach practitioners how to identify potential barriers to learning (“red flags”), how they can help children with mild issues in the creche, and who to refer children to that have more severe problems. We also run Waste2Toys workshops, which are fun, hands-on training sessions that teach parents, practitioners and community workers how to make their own toys and teaching materials using recycling, and how to play with these with their children to develop foundational skills. Our goal at these workshops is to help practitioners and parents understand that it is the play that is important, not how much the toys cost. Expensive equipment is not what determines how well children learn. The same skills are developed when using a skipping rope made from bread bags or one bought from a shop. All that is needed to provide purposeful play activities is a dedicated, enthusiastic adult with a pair of scissors, a marker pen and access to a whole lot of recycling. The Play@Home with Singakwenza app has more than 50 activities that adults can make and play with their children. With a daily reminder to Play@Home, there are “recipes” on how to make each activity (using only a pair of scissors, a marker and household packaging), instructions on how to play the games, and information on what skills each activity is developing so that adults can see their child’s development and mastery. Once it has been downloaded, no more data is needed for it to be used every day. Available on Android and FREE for anyone to download from the Google Play Store.

What is your biggest success?

Our Singakwenza program works! We have undertaken a rigorous Monitoring and Evaluation process to carefully record the impact that our program is having on both the practitioners and the children. We use an assessment tool called the Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM), which is a reliable, valid, standardised instrument for the measurement of Early Childhood Development program effectiveness for children in the year prior to Grade R. It was developed to align with South African curriculum and early learning standards. The testing covers 5 domains which assess the holistic development of the child. At the baseline which was done in February 2024, just 19% of the children were on track, with 30% falling behind and 51% falling far behind. After just 10 months of our program, in November 2024, 73% of children were on track, 19% were falling behind and only 8% were falling far behind. We have worked in over 100 creches in the past 15 years, empowered over 250 practitioners to be able to run an affordable, effective and fun early learning program for thousands of preschool children. We have run in excess of 700 Waste 2 Toys training workshops for over 15,000 adults enabling them to make their own toys for more than 300,000 children in their care.

What has been your biggest hurdle?

Our biggest hurdle has been helping adults to understand that the cost of a toy does not give it a greater educational value. Sadly parents and teachers are sold the idea that the best learning materials have to be commercially produced, when in actual fact they can make most of the materials needed to provide young children with a wide variety of learning experiences using what they already have in their homes. Many people see our resources as only appropriate for 'poor' communities, not realising that every plastic toy they buy contributes to the pollution of our country and planet. Environmentalists say that plastic toys are as much of an environmental threat as plastic packaging and are contributing to the amount of plastic ending up in landfill and oceans. Over USD108 billion was spent globally on toys in 2024 (The Global Toy Report), 90 percent of toys are made from plastic, and 80 percent of these end up being incinerated, or in landfill or the ocean (Ellen MacArthur Foundation).