Early childhood care and education access in South Africa during COVID-19: Evidence from NIDS-CRAM

ABSTRACT

Using a longitudinal telephonic survey of adults, this paper provides empirical evidence from South Africa on early childhood care and education (ECCE) attendance trends just before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 39% of adult respondents living with children aged 0–6 indicated that at least one child had attended an ECCE programme in February 2020. After a period of ECCE programme closures and lockdowns, estimates fell to as low as 7% in July/August 2020, partially recovered to 28% in November/December 2020, dropped again to 7% in early February 2021 but then recovered significantly to 36% by April/May 2021. A decomposition analysis suggests that a large part of the recovery in ECCE attendance in 2021 was attributed to higher reported perceived ability to be able to afford ECCE programme fees. This could relate to lower fee ECCE programmes resuming operations in anticipation of government relief payments.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood care and education
• early childhood development
• pre-primary
• COVID-19
• South Africa

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• I28
• H12

Acknowledgements

The authors thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Very rough estimates of how children’s access to ECCE has been affected are suggested in the World Bank et al. (2021:24).

2 Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private philanthropy also engaged in significant efforts to support the reopening of ECCE programmes from mid-2020. For a further discussion on their role over this period see Wills & Kika-Mistry (2021c).

3 Ethics approval for the NIDS-CRAM study was obtained through the University of Cape Town (UCT) Commerce Ethics Committee.

4 The reason for this was due to attrition between waves 1 and 2 (at roughly 19%). The sample was replenished by adding randomly selected individuals from the original NIDS Wave 5 sample who were not yet selected for NIDS-CRAM Wave 1 (Ingle et al., 2021:8).

5 In wave 2, the question on children attending ECCE programmes in the past seven days is only asked of those reporting that children attended programmes in March 2020 (pre-pandemic). This question skip was removed in wave 3, allowing us to determine how much higher the estimate of reported ECCE attendance would be if there was no skip restriction in wave 2. The 4% reported ECCE attendance in wave 2 was increased by a raising factor to get 7% (see Wills et al., 2021).

6 The 2013/14 ECD audit indicates that half of programmes surveyed reported closing over school holidays.

7 Grade R refers to a reception year before the first grade of formal schooling. Even in households without any grade Rs, reported ECCE attendance remains quite high at 32%, and is significantly higher than ECCE attendance estimates in the weeks after school reopened on 15 February 2021.

8 Of respondents living with children aged 0–6 in wave 3-5, just 61% provide a consistent pre-pandemic response about whether children were attending ECCE in February 2020.

9 This question on affordability of ECCE fees was asked of respondents living with children aged 0–6 regardless of whether children were attending an ECCE programme.

10 A similar result holds if we restrict the sample to a balanced panel living with children aged 0–6 in waves 3-5.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Michael and Susan Dell Foundation [grant number NIDS-CRAM], Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Endowment [grant number NIDS-CRAM] and FEM Education Foundation [grant number NIDS-CRAM].