It no longer takes a village to raise a child, it takes a nation:
In South Africa, millions of children are born into circumstances that limit their access to quality early education. The belief that it takes a village to bring up a child guided our social fabric. But in today’s reality, amid deep inequality, widespread poverty and a persistent education crisis, it takes far more.
Early childhood development (ECD) is not just an education issue; it is a national emergency. Science has made it unequivocally clear: the first six years of life are critical for brain development, social-emotional growth and long-term wellbeing. According to the World Bank, investments in early childhood generate some of the highest returns in human capital, up to 13% a year through improved health, education and economic outcomes. And yet, in South Africa, quality ECD services remain underfunded, undervalued and inaccessible to many.
The numbers speak for themselves. While department of basic education has made notable progress in integrating ECD into the education system, many young children, especially those in rural and informal settlements, continue to fall through the cracks. According to a 2022 United Nations Children’s Fund report, only 41% of children aged three to five attend any kind of early learning programme. Even fewer have access to centres that are adequately resourced or equipped to cater to children with disabilities.
The government has taken steps to prioritise ECD. The migration of ECD oversight from the department of social development to the basic education department is a welcome shift. But, as experts have pointed out, structural change must be matched by implementation on the ground. Budget allocations, while increasing, remain insufficient when distributed across thousands of centres with varying needs. Worse still, funds are often delayed or diverted before reaching frontline service providers.
As emphasised by the ECD Census 2021, only 41% of centres reported receiving government subsidies. This figure is even lower in non-urban areas. If ECD is to become the bedrock of our education system, then funding must be targeted, reliable and transparent. It must be accompanied by interdepartmental collaboration, linking health, education, and social services, and a strong accountability framework to monitor outcomes.
Nation-building is not the work of the government alone. The private sector, civil society, academic institutions and families must recognise that early learning is everyone’s business. Corporates can contribute not only through funding, but also through strategic partnerships, knowledge sharing and technology innovations. NGOs, particularly those working at grassroots level, must be trusted and empowered to implement solutions that are contextually relevant and responsive to local needs.
Families, too, must be supported. Parents and caregivers are a child’s first teachers, yet many lack the resources, time, or confidence to fulfil this role. Evidence from The Lancet confirms that nurturing care in the home environment is essential for brain development. Public awareness campaigns, community support groups, and home-based learning tools must be expanded.
Importantly, the ECD workforce deserves recognition. Thousands of practitioners, mostly women, work tirelessly in under-resourced environments, often with minimal training and low pay. Professionalising the sector through accredited qualifications, mentoring, and career pathways is essential to improving the quality and sustainability of services.
One of the most urgent and overlooked problems is the inclusion of children with disabilities. As highlighted in a 2021 Human Rights Watch report, many children with disabilities are still excluded from mainstream ECD centres. Inclusive education cannot be a policy on paper — it must be a practice in every classroom.
This means training educators to work with diverse learners, equipping centres with accessible facilities, and fostering inclusive mindsets from the earliest age. The principle is simple: see the child before the challenge. Inclusion benefits everyone. It teaches empathy, collaboration, and respect for difference, values our country sorely needs.
The call is urgent, but the vision is within reach. A South Africa where every child, regardless of where they are born or their abilities, has a fair start in life, is not a pipe dream — it is a choice. One that we must make together.
To achieve this, we must move from pilot projects to scale, from silos to systems, and from short-term funding cycles to long-term investment strategies. A whole-of-society approach is not just desirable; it is necessary.
It will take hearts that care deeply, hands that work tirelessly, and heads that think boldly. But most of all, it will take a nation that rises to meet the moment.
Theresa Michael is the chief executive of Afrika Tikkun Bambanani.
Muneyi: A decade of storytelling and musical integrity pays off:
For years, Muneyi’s music has felt like a quiet promise. If you were listening closely, you could hear it — in the tenderness of his lyrics, in the way he carried his Venda heritage without flinching, in the softness he refused to hide.
But now, after nearly a decade of slow-burning releases, performances, collaborations and prayerful patience, that promise has bloomed.
The 2024 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Music went to Muneyi and, in many ways, it couldn’t have gone to anyone more deserving.
The award, which has recognised some of South Africa’s most daring creative voices, felt like a belated acknowledgement of what many fans already knew — Muneyi is one of the most spiritually grounded, emotionally intelligent and musically generous artists of his generation.
When Muneyi learned he had won, he was surrounded by friends at the Cape Town Art Fair but he couldn’t tell a soul.
“I got a message from someone at Standard Bank,” he recalls. “But I’ve done a lot of work with them before, so I didn’t think much of it.”
It wasn’t until he received a call from the National Arts Festival director that it clicked: “She told me I’d been selected as this year’s recipient. I was shocked.”
It’s a quiet kind of joy that’s become familiar in Muneyi’s journey, one defined less by sudden explosion and more by slow, intentional work.
Now 29, the singer-songwriter has been building toward this moment for nearly a decade.
“I’ve been actively making music since around 2017,” he says. “But I started writing in 2014. That was the first time I picked up a guitar — and I just couldn’t put it down.”
Born in the small village of Tshilapfene, outside Thohoyandou, and brought up by his grandmother, Muneyi’s music has always been rooted in storytelling.
The lyrics, often sung in his mother tongue Tshivenda, are deeply reflective, emotionally textured, and unflinchingly personal.
“When I started making music, I thought I’d make pop,” he laughs.
“I even wrote some English pop songs that I’ve never released. But when I was working on my first album, which was dedicated to my grandmother, I wanted it to be in a language she understands.
“That changed everything.”
His 2021 debut album Makhulu was a tribute to the woman who brought him up. Entirely in Tshivenda, it doesn’t just speak to one woman’s legacy. It’s a love letter to a language, a place and a way of being.
“I write in a specific dialect — an early 1930s version of Tshivenda — which is what my grandmother speaks,” he explains. “She never went to school, so as the language evolved, she wasn’t part of that change.
“I realised that if I didn’t preserve it, who would?”
The decision to sing in Tshivenda wasn’t always a good commercial one, but it was deliberate.
“There were moments of frustration,” he admits. “People would say, ‘We love what you do, but we don’t fully get it.’ So, I thought, ‘Let me give you some context. Let me write in English too, so you can understand me. Then we can go back to my language together.’”
This ethos plays out across his discography, which includes the deeply personal for the boys i like EP (2023) and this year’s project There’s a Burning Sensation Where My Heart Used To Be. Each release represents a new chapter in self-discovery and artistic evolution.
“for the boys i like was about exploring who I am. It was vulnerable, intimate. And There’s a Burning Sensation was about reflective self-forgiveness,” he says.
Musically, Muneyi resists neat categorisation. His sound blends different genres including contemporary folk, indie, singer-songwriter ballads and, increasingly, rock.
“The next project is going to be Tshivenda rock,” he shares, eyes lighting up. “Guitar-heavy, inspired by the rock and metal scenes, especially in Botswana.”
Part of what makes Muneyi so compelling is how grounded he is in community and collaboration. He’s a founding member of Litsomo (Sesotho for “folk tales”), with Leomile and Keke Lingo, a collective that emerged from a circle of friends inviting each other to gigs.
“At some point, we were like, ‘Yo, let’s actually do this thing properly,’” he says. “We realised that a lot of our songs were like folk tales. So, we picked a name that reflected that. And now we’re a real band.”
While they haven’t recorded yet, the group has already carved out a niche with live performances.
“We write together, perform together and only then do we record,” Muneyi explains. “By the time we get into the studio, the song has lived. It has energy. It has a response. That’s important to us.”
Winning the Standard Bank award comes at a pivotal time in Muneyi’s life. It’s a crowning moment that doesn’t feel like a beginning so much as a confirmation, a quiet nod from the universe that the long road is leading somewhere meaningful.
“It still feels surreal,” he says.
“But I’m grateful. Deeply.”
In some ways, Muneyi has always been ahead of his time, writing music in a language underrepresented in the mainstream, exploring themes of identity, love and loss, crafting stories that refuse to be flattened into genre or formula. It’s precisely this refusal to conform that has made his work so resonant, especially for those searching for something true.
He’s not chasing trends. He’s building something lasting.
When asked about the future, Muneyi is thoughtful.
“Going forward, all my albums will be in Tshivenda,” he says. “I just think it’s really important to sing in our home languages because I think it taps into a certain part of ourselves that you really can’t tap into with a language that is learned as a second or third.”
At 29, after years of being “on the cusp,” Muneyi is no longer emerging; he’s arrived. And the rest of us are lucky to be here for it.
The God Edition | The road to Emmaus and a call for justice:
If you read this article, it will be at the onset of Easter or Paschal Triduum – a three-day period stretching from Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday) through Good Friday and Holy Saturday, culminating with the evening prayers of Easter Sunday.
The Easter Sunday prayer that concludes the Triduum signifies the conclusion of the Paschal Mystery, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of eternal life – well beyond the grave.
This is a three-day period in the liturgical year. It commemorates the passion, death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, beginning with the Mass on Holy Thursday.
Worldwide, Christendom marks the Easter Triduum as the centrepiece of Christian faith in which liturgies of the Word and Eucharist are celebrated to mark Christ’s victory over death, reminding us that the death of injustice and inequality in the world, if we all work towards seeing each other as our brother’s or sister’s keeper, is possible.
It is the gospel passage of Luke 24.13-35 that is compelling. It spells out the meaning of the Resurrection story.
It spells out the inauguration of Eucharist in a more relatable style, filled with conviction and power.
The long passage, which I will truncate, is about the journey on the road to Emmaus: “Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each about everything that had happened.
“As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along them; but they were kept from recognising him.
“He asked them, ‘what are you discussing together as you walk along’.”
“They stood still – their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, ‘Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days?’
“What things?” he asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people…
“The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hope that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel…
“In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found just as the women had said, but him they did not see…
“As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, ‘Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over. So, he went to stay with them.
“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.
“Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappear from their sight…
“They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. They found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, ‘It is true. The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon…”
This weekend, the Church re-enacts the Lukean story of the Resurrection. In Luke’s account of the Resurrection, we also see women who had prepared spices apparently to keep his body embalmed, because they loved him to bits, a wonder man who in his life-time had been on the side of justice, keeping alive the hope of those who were oppressed by oppressive principalities.
Luke’s gospel account of the resurrection, early on the first day of the week, the women who had prepared spices, took them to the tomb, but to their dismay found the tomb empty.
They were confronted by two men in shiningly white garments, announcing that the grave was not able to contain him, and so he had risen, reminding them of his prophecies about his suffering, death, and resurrection.
Full of disbelief and joy, they rushed back to the apostles to share the good news, but initially, the apostles dismissed their words as doubtful.
Peter went to the tomb, to confirm what the disciples thought to be a manufactured story with no substance to it.
But let us return to Jesus’ appearances to the disciples, including the Emmaus Road journey where he shared a meal with them, and his appearance to the Eleven in Jerusalem.
Luke contrasts the initial disbelief of the apostles with the growing faith of those who witnessed Jesus’ resurrection appearances.
We are followers of Jesus because of his priesthood, conferred to his apostles, and then to us, his New Testament friends and modern-day apostles, bonded to him through the apostolic succession, and because of our understanding that the permanence of Jesus’ priesthood, and the eucharistic food he shared with his two friends enroute to Emmaus, is a product of Jesus’s resurrection and immortality.
At the last supper, Jesus commands his friends to follow him by “continuing in perpetuity the sacred rite, the Eucharist”.
At the village, presumably Emmaus, we hear the two men enroute to Emmaus say, “stay with us, for it is nearly evening, the day is almost over”.
And so, the risen Jesus acceded to their request, and not only stayed with them, he went to the table with them, taking bread, giving thanks, breaking it, and sharing it with them.
In one spirit, inspired by the resurrection spirit, the two-some, moved together by the spirit of the resurrection, and great hope, return to Jerusalem with lifted spirit of everlasting life, and hope that death, in the words of Saint Paul, can never separate us from the love of Christ.
In Jerusalem they found the Eleven, “assembled together, and all agreeing, “it is true” he is risen.
Then the two friends, in Jerusalem, related their story with the risen Lord to the other friends, and how “Jesus was recognised by them when he broke the bread” sharing it with them.
Christians throughout the world – and this goes even for marginal Christians – will in their numbers make a beeline to church services attracted to the Easter message of new life and hope.
They will reconnect with the crucified Lord, and yet risen Christ, made present in the life of believers through the Church and the liturgy of the Eucharist and the gospels, and the priests of the Church, all representing the risen Christ.
Might it be that all of this will give not only content but meaning to the Easter Triduum story, especially as it is captured by the gospel writer of Luke.
We will reflect, starting today on Good Friday through Sunday, Easter Sunday, to think of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, knowing that we are, as the Church, Christ’s body in which the Resurrected life of Christ “remains visibly present” 2 000 years after his crucifixion.
Simply put, and in the words of the Matthean gospel (Matthew 28.20), the leadership and apostolic mission of justice and love and commitment to social justice is the mission of the Church.
“I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
On Sunday, as we end the Paschal Triduum, the Church prayer is that we may find our path back to the ways of egalitarianism and social justice, remembering our ancestors who include Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, Beyers Naude, Steve Bantu Biko, Chief Albert Luthuli, Chris Hani, Strini Moodley, among the political icons who suffered under apartheid.
Let us during these three days seek inspiration to seek justice for all, irrespective of our political affiliation – or whether we are Christians or not, for Jesus the Christ, also sought justice and equity for his community, and for all humanity.
Jo-Mangaliso Mdhlela is an independent journalist, a former trade unionist, an Anglican priest and a social justice activist.
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