TSHEPO MANTJÉ AND TATIANA KAZIM | SA must deliver on promise to feed children

For years, early childhood development (ECD) practitioners across SA have carried an invisible burden: feeding children with too little support in a system that recognises the importance of nutrition but has never fully delivered on it.

Last week the bid closed on the basic education department’s pilot nutrition programme targeting 1,035 ECD centres in the Eastern Cape that are presently excluded from nutrition funding.

Two years after R197m was first earmarked for this programme, it is a moment that demands not just celebration but delivery.

In 2023, Real Reform for ECD launched its Right to Nutrition campaign in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, presenting a body of research grounded in law, health science, and economics.

That research made a simple but urgent case: SA cannot achieve quality early learning without ensuring that children are properly fed.

At the time, there was no national programme guaranteeing meals for young children attending ECD programmes, with the ECD subsidy (R17 per child per day, with R6,80 allocated to nutrition) far below what is required to provide two nutritious meals and a snack − and still failing to reach most children who needed it.

The subsidy has since increased to R24 per child per day, with R9,60 allocated to nutrition in 2025. An important step, but still insufficient and limited in reach.

Entry-level bronze-registered ECD centres, which operate in informal settlements and deep rural areas and make up about 60% of all centres, do not qualify for this subsidy at all. And in fact, the true cost of providing nutritious meals stands at R31,61 per child per day.

More than one in four South African children under the age of five are stunted − too short for their age. Close to half suffer from vitamin A deficiency. The rate of stunting has not improved since 1994. In a food-secure nation, this is not an inevitability; it is a policy failure.

Section 28 of the constitution guarantees every child the right to basic nutrition. Section 29 guarantees a right to basic education, including early learning, which our courts have recognised cannot be achieved if children have empty stomachs.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s commitment to ending child stunting by 2030 is an ambitious and necessary goal, but it will not be achieved through lip service.

ECD programmes are uniquely positioned as sites for the government to deliver on this commitment. They are daily, structured spaces where young children gather, making them ideal platforms for consistent, targeted nutrition support.

The planned pilot rightly targets bronze-registered centres through which it will now reach approximately 26,000 of the children who need it most.

The ECD landscape is deeply unequal and diverse: urban and rural contexts differ vastly; bronze-registered and fully registered centres operate under very different conditions; formal facilities sit alongside informal, community-based programmes.

A rigid, centralised delivery model risks excluding exactly the children requiring the support, as the basic education department’s own failed attempt to fold ECD nutrition into the National School Nutrition Programme in 2024 demonstrated.

ECD practitioners are not passive recipients of policy. They are active providers of care, often sustaining entire systems of support under extreme constraints.

A successful nutrition programme must leverage local food systems, support community-based providers, and adapt to infrastructure realities, including the many centres that operate without kitchens.

Children cannot eat policy. They cannot eat plans. They cannot eat unspent budgets.

The question is no longer whether SA should implement an ECD nutrition programme. The question is whether we will deliver it, urgently, equitably, and at scale.

• Mantjé is ECD coordinator at Real Reform for ECD, and Kazim is a member of the ECD steering committee