On Monday the 27th of February, The Nelson Mandela Foundation in partnership with the Early Care Foundation held the first session of a Leadership Skills Development Programme for Early Childhood Development (ECD) practitioners. With this programme, we aim to empower and support the critical role played in the community and in the broader ECD sector by ECD Forums, which are a collection of ECD principals in their respective communities.
The pilot ECD Forum Leadership Skills Programme is designed to build the capacity of existing ECD Forum executive teams towards formalising their structures and provide an opportunity for reflection, networking, & shared learning.
“We are always inspired by the work of ECD principals and practitioners in the ECD sector who with the little resources they have serve the children of their community with love and care,” said Sello Hatang, Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. “We believe that this programme recognizes their importance and will help to enhance the contribution they are able to make. We are grateful to the Early Care Foundation for partnering with us on this programme.”
“The Early Care Foundation supports sustainable initiatives in early childhood development. Sustainability is at the heart of what we do by gradually establishing efforts towards compliance, early learning, and basic business practices to enable the ECD centres to become financially viable. Our programmes focus on quality early learning through the delivery of practitioner training, mentoring and support visits; as well as recognizing the ECD site heads as entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities.” said Ipeleng Mohlala, Chief Executive Officer of Early Care Foundation.
“We recognize ECD forums as important structures to drive the agenda on ECD and other issues that may affect their communities. By empowering the forum executives, we are ensuring effectiveness of the forums. We are excited about this partnership with Nelson Mandela Foundation, and we are looking forward to sharing this programme with the sector”, Ms Mohlala added.
The programme will comprise 4 modules delivered in person, support workshops over a period of 18 days from February to May, and a one-day site visit with each ECD Forum meeting. The course content will be open source for the rest of the sector to engage with and learn from once the pilot programme has been completed.
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