Help 120 South African children attend pre-school

Our Achievements in 2021

In this period 19 January 2022 to 13 May 2022, Ubunye Educare Centre offered the following services to 120 pre-school children aged 5- 6 and their parents.

• Provided quality early childhood education for 120 children aged 5 - 6 from Dunoon Township to prepare them for primary education. Despite the COVID-19 lockdown. At the start of this year, we had 100 per cent enrolment for 2022. The Western Cape Education Department has announced that all our learners can return to school and that rotational teaching is behind us. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted teaching time on a huge scale. The learners have all been back at school for seven weeks now and we are trying to make up lost teaching time. Ubunye attributes its success during these unprecedented time to collective efforts of in-kind and financial supporters including GlobalGiving, our staff and the parents.

• Provided routine paediatric health check-ups for general health and well-being of children enrolled in our care. All of our learners have undergone paediatric health check-ups for hearing and eye screening in the first quarter.

• Provided a balanced diet during school days for children enrolled in our care to meet their nutritional needs for growth and development of healthy children. In the first quarter for 2022, we served 144 meals to 120 learners.

• We successfully ran our eight-week parent training to 30 parents in collaboration with WordWorks, a local NGO that facilitates a learning space for parents. During the training parents learned about children’s language and early literacy development.

 Challenges:

While COVID-19 remains a great challenge to our work, Ubunye has developed strategies to ensure that our staff and learners and their parents are safe. We conducted extensive education on COVID-19 prevention measures and protocols as prescribed by the South Africa Department of Health.

Future plans for 2023:

Ubunye envision to enrol 120 learners in 2023. We currently have 32 learners who will join us next year. These numbers will soon reach 120 as many parents only enrol their children in January each year.

We plan to continue to provide quality education and services to our learners and our community in 2022 and 2023.

These services will include:

• Our academic programme
• Feeding programme
• Paediatric health check-ups
• 8 week parent programme