The ‘child from a village’ who helped reshape SA’s early childhood development sector

Early childhood development (ECD) advocate and social development services innovator Ntjantja Ned began her career as a social worker in QwaQwa, Free State, in 1978. While conducting community work and family visits in the former apartheid homeland, she witnessed first-hand the steep challenges facing young children.

Ned went on to serve as chief director of the Free State Department of Social Welfare, deputy director-general of the national Department of Social Development and CEO of the Hollard Foundation – the corporate social investment arm of Hollard Insurance.

She credits her success as a leader to never forgetting who she once was: “a child from the village”.

“That remembering of who I am, where I come from and what matters in the life of a child ... becomes what matters in the life of a person given responsibility to lead,” Ned told Daily Maverick.

Reshaping social service delivery

Upon taking leadership of the Free State Department of Social Welfare, Ned recognised that real power stems from collective wisdom and surrounded herself with advisers who possessed deep expertise and weren’t afraid to challenge her perspective.

“The strength comes from the diversity of this country, of humans, and we become an ecosystem when we do that. Being appointed to a position does not mean you know it all and you can do it all. It really just means you are serving the people that are around you, so that they go out and serve others better,” she says.

Ned reshaped social service delivery in the Free State and went on to do the same at national scale in her role as a deputy director-general of the Department of Social Development. There, she led the process of designing the Child Support Grant as a replacement for the racially discriminatory apartheid-era social support system.

“The first five, 10 years of democracy were an incredible opportunity for South Africans to turn out and make a contribution to what we had all been saying we wanted – a nonracial South Africa; a country that respects all of its people, that understands and embraces the different cultures and the colourfulness of this country,” said Ned.

She recalled presenting the concept of the Child Support Grant to Parliament, and driving the process of integrating into one equitable framework the 18 different payment systems that had spanned different races and areas during apartheid. One of the central concerns was sustainability and how to accommodate a far greater number of children in the social security system.

“We were guided by the view that we should open the safety net, and from that, then we could start deepening as we understood ... the stabilising of our budget as a country, and consolidation of all the different budgets from these [government] departments,” said Ned.

Working with municipalities

In 2006, Ned was invited to become a founding trustee of the Hollard Foundation, with a focus on designing and supporting a programme of work to address the systemic neglect of under-served and vulnerable children in the country.

“As the board of Hollard Trust, we said we really needed to find a way of working in partnership [with municipalities], so that we understood why they were not delivering... We decided up front that our approach in serving children would be to go where the children were. That was our first principle,” explained Ned.

The Hollard Foundation’s strategy, guided by Ned, was to operationalise 60% of its resources at the local government level, ensuring a bottom-up, systemic approach that allowed the organisation to become a key systems-change actor in the ECD sector.

“What really was significant for us, looking back, was that work with local municipalities, helping communities get early childhood development into the Integrated Development Plans of government,” said Ned.

“On our side, we were actually funding and saying to municipalities that they should have a unit of early childhood development that will work with the other [local] departments, like... zoning and land use.”

The right people

In Ned’s view, the challenges facing women in South Africa have always been three-fold: not just race and inequality, but also the patriarchy.

“[Women] were not seen as significant. Child-rearing ... was not sufficiently appreciated. It was not appreciated that this is investing in our own future [and] the Human Development Index of South Africa. It’s intertwined. It’s integrated,” she said.

Women’s voices and potential are still restricted, argued Ned, requiring greater effort on the part of those in public service to pursue partnerships and drive systems change.

Drawing lessons from her own long career in policy-making and reform, she emphasised that money alone was not enough to drive progress.

“Money doesn’t solve problems. People do. Money helps people solve problems… We need the right people,” said Ned. DM