SoundStart: Audio Learning for ECD in South Africa

We are delighted to announce that SoundStart has formally launched in Cape Town’s high-density townships. In partnership with GROW with Educare Centres, Lifeplayer MP3 units were placed in township schools in an area known as the Cape Flats. The preschools include children from aged two to five.

The Lifeplayers were loaded with locally produced music and songs produced by preschool education musicologists, Wriggle and Rhyme. Teachers and caregivers are starting school days with an upbeat song in English as the eager children gather around the Lifeplayer. The songs helps develop memorization and listening skills while dancing helps to build fine and gross motor skills. 

Connie, one of the preschool principals, said that she welcomed the Lifeplayers because the children enjoying singing and dancing. Because many of the children are from different countries, the only language they have in common is English. The songs are helping them to learning English as well.”

GROW with Educare, a social enterprise started in 2013, is dedicated to establishing and supporting high-quality preschools in under-served areas in South Africa. Its goal is to provide an excellent and well-rounded early education to South African and immigrant children from poor families. To help ensure sustainability, GROW offers micro-franchising opportunities for existing preschool providers, as well as to unemployed women. All are comprehensively trained to run a preschool center.

GROW establishes fee paying schools where the schools’ owners become franchisees and pay a monthly franchise fee to support a self-sustainable foundation. This model allows the preschool to become self-funded after the initial investment, in addition to providing consistent training, mentoring, resources and general support. The monthly cost of attending a GROW preschool for a child is between $25 and $35, which includes two meals a day. This equates to approximately two days’ wages for a domestic worker or laborer.

If Phase 1 of SoundStart proves to be successful, more Lifeplayers will be needed for additional schools. Please help to support this wonderful initiative.

There is no government oversight in South Africa for early childhood development (ECD) programing, and for many children, Grade R (kindergarten) provides their first exposure to any education. Well-resourced preschools exist in affluent areas where parents can afford to pay high school fees. In informal settlements and township areas, most preschool facilities simply act as holding pens while parents work, with few facilities and little or no learning resources. It is estimated that there are around six million children of preschool age, with over 70% of ECD facilities in South Africa unsuited to providing the standard of service and resources necessary to support a proper and solid learning environment.

Caregivers are mostly untrained, and are often grandmothers or women who want to help out. The closure of training colleges for preschool teachers has caused a severe shortage of formally-trained preschool teachers. The dire state of ECD in South Africa impacts most severely children in poor communities, where early education intervention is needed the most. The result is that children are entering formal school with no basic numeracy and literacy skills and poor fine and gross motor skills.  

The fit-for-purpose power-independent Lifeplayer, an MP3 player, radio and recorder, is a tool that will be used to enrich and support ECD learning. Robustly engineered for users with limited exposure to technology, its excellent sound quality means it is suitable for large group listening. The Lifeplayer uses a microSD card to store unlimited hours of quality content anytime, anywhere.

SoundStart will demonstrate that both children and teachers benefit from using a Lifeplayer in the classroom and that it can be put to scale quickly and economically. 

Please consider supporting this hugely worthwhile initiative.