Think, Plan, Act and Adapt! Ilifa Labantwana’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

OPPORTUNITY

HANDS-ON Experience Learning

Ilifa Labantwana’s COVID-19 Response

4Give every child the benefit of early childhood development

THINK, PLAN, ACT AND ADAPT!

Ilifa Labantwana’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic provides important lessons for civil society on how to respond to increased demand for social services from low-resource communities in rural and semi-urban areas.

From the onset of South Africa’s hard lockdown in March 2020, it was clear the government would not be able to address the humanitarian challenges associated with the pandemic on its own. Civil society groups partnered with one another, funders and government, trying to mitigate the loss of income, increasing hunger and lack of access to personal protective equipment (PPE). The early childhood development (ECD) sector – which is largely informal and dominated by women –was particularly vulnerable because it mainly consists of microsubsistence-based enterprises generating an income for the women who run them and their staff.

Disruptions to ECD programmes impede the ability of mothers to take up income-earning opportunities because they tend to shoulder the burden of childcare.

At the height of the pandemic, thousands of ECD sites were forced to close and livelihoods were threatened. Unregistered ECD programmes, and the women who run them, were most at risk. Millions of children faced hunger and the loss of essential ECD services such as early learning and nutrition programmes. Civil society rallied in response and documented the impact of the pandemic on the sector with an April 2020 report, The Plight of the ECD Workforce

It’s important to note that registration is a complex process that requires approval from several government departments and certain resources, and as such is beyond the reach of most informal ECD practitioners.

Ilifa Labantwana is committed to quality ECD for all children. Over the years, it has worked with the government and a range of implementing partners to demonstrate effective delivery mechanisms for a suite of quality, age-appropriate early childhood development programmes.

Ilifa spearheaded an ambitious response that brought urgent relief to the ECD sector at a time when it was most needed. It mobilised resources and partnerships, raised R36-million in funds and launched the Early Childhood Development COVID-19 Response Project in September 2020.

It had two major objectives:

to help unregistered South African ECD programmes withstand the pressure of the pandemic and meet stringent government COVID-19 protocols to re-open; and to see if ECD sites serving poor children could be used as nodes for delivering nutrition interventions, using electronic vouchers.

Time was of the essence. Given the limited timeframe to initiate such a relatively wide-scale project, Ilifa built its response on available data from a rapid survey of ECD practitioners in April 2020. The planning phase involved fundraising and due diligence on proposed aspects of the project. Ilifa also engaged a range of ECD stakeholders by co-designing the project with funders and potential partners, and contracted three NGOs to implement the project’s activities with their own cohort of ECD sites, staff and children. These implementing partners were: SmartStart, The Unlimited Child and Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU).

In total, the project helped more than 1 700 unregistered ECD sites to re-open by November 2020. It ensured about 30 000 children received regular, healthy meals over a period of 18 weeks and provided income support to almost 3 500 ECD workers. By March 2021, almost all the project sites had fully reopened, most of the children had returned and an encouraging proportion of parents had recommenced paying fees.

This learning brief explores the decisions and factors that enabled and constrained Ilifa’s response to the pandemic so that civil society organisations can learn from the experience and adapt aspects of the response to their own work.

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAYS

This was a complex project to get off the ground, with challenges and lessons for the Ilifa management team and implementing partners. Ever-changing COVID-19 regulations added another layer of complexity, constantly challenging field operations. Nevertheless, Ilifa managed to achieve most of its objectives and the following high-level takeaways can prove useful to civil society.

Strong project management required

When conducting a large and ambitious project in a humanitarian crisis, with a sizeable budget and various implementing partners in different provinces, strong and ongoing project management is required.

Ilifa put together a project management team to: coordinate all activities with implementing partners; manage problems and issues as they arose; drive the monitoring, evaluation and learning aspects of the project; and report to funders.

Careful research is essential

Ilifa demonstrated that even in times of crises, when there is urgent pressure to respond, it is essential to obtain information directly from the intended beneficiaries to provide an effective response. The rapid survey conducted by Ilifa and other organisations in April 2020 found that, of the 8 500 ECD programmes that were contacted, nearly all of them said caregivers had stopped paying fees; 83% had not been able to pay their staff’s salaries over the lockdown period; 96% said that their income could not cover their operating costs; and 68% were worried they would not be able to reopen after lockdown.

Four months later in August 2020, the widely reported NIDS-CRAM Wave 2 study1 confirmed the validity of the initial survey, reporting that ECD attendance dropped to an 18-year low of just 13%.

The findings from the research enabled Ilifa to design a comprehensive project approach with key interventions necessary to provide the following basic support to selected ECD sites:

COVID-19 compliance materials (containing all required cleaning and hygiene materials) and other compliance support such as reliable water access and water storage capacity needed to be made available.

CoCare vouchers were issued via SMS to ECD site managers – to be redeemed for food for the children –and to ECD staff, providing them with income support.

Ilifa provided a guideline document that recommended 10 food purchases that were affordable and would promote physical and cognitive development in children.

HOW THE COCARE VOUCHER SYSTEM WORKS

Flash (the retail technology service provider) sends an SMS to the mobile phones of verified beneficiaries. This notifies recipients that they have received a CoCare voucher. It provides the amount of the voucher, the expiry date and a voucher PIN. Beneficiaries take this PIN to their nearest Flash/Kazang vendor and may purchase essential items to the value of the voucher. The beneficiary may redeem the whole amount in one shop, or partially redeem it, in which case the system automatically sends a new PIN for the balance of the voucher.

GIVE EVERY CHILD THE BENEFIT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

1 Wills, G., Kotze, J., Kika-Mistry, J. (2020) A Sector Hanging in the Balance: ECD and Lockdown in South Africa

Harness existing capacity of NGOs

Ilifa worked with NGOs and leveraged their existing local capacity, relationships and networks with ECD programmes to ensure the success of the project. It would not have been possible for the project to have wide-scale reach if the implementing partners were not already operating in the ECD space. NGOs with large footprints (i.e. across multiple provinces) should work with local organisations to maximise local-level relationships, communitybased and regional knowledge systems, and stakeholder buy-in. However, it is important to note that partners may need additional support as their resources will be stretched by the crisis. Depending on the scale of the effort, NGOs may need more support and capacity at all levels (field, office and management personnel) and areas (such as technical capacity, monitoring systems and management tools) to provide an expanded range of services.

Appropriate ECD sites and ECD staff had to be identified and verified by NGO partners. They were able to identify and validate unregistered ECD sites using their existing databases and networks. Where organisations did not have an existing network, the implementing partners conducted a manual audit of ECD sites in the community and consulted bodies such as ECD forums. The partners demonstrated that NGOs can effectively identify and confirm the validity of ECD sites and staff through a variety of approaches, which include speaking to community leaders and residents to verify that the site had been operational and serving the community prior to the onset of the pandemic, the collection of staff payslips, bank statements or affidavits.

Given the complexities and risks associated with disseminating funds, Ilifa learnt through implementation experience that voucher PINs must be secure and only accessible to the ultimate beneficiary to avoid them being redeemed by individuals who are not the intended recipients. In fact, in one instance, such fraud happened during the project and was flagged when the retail technology service provider identified that a number of vouchers were redeemed on one particular device in a short time period.

Civil society is not immune to the misuse of resources. It’s something that the sector must continually work to strengthen by learning from mistakes and carefully considering the controls that should be put into place.

Inaccurate data hampers delivery

The project targeted unregistered ECD sites in low-resource communities because they were most in need of support and least likely to obtain government assistance. The reality is that many of these sites do not have a computer, let alone accurate databases recording the number of school children attending on weekly or part-time bases or the number of full-time or parttime staff. This meant that implementing partners often had to gather all this information from scratch and this took a long time, impacting the number of beneficiary requests that could be submitted before the deadline2 .

In times of crises, when government departments reallocate resources for emergency expenditure without rigorous oversight and accountability measures, the conditions are ripe for corruption, maladministration, and malfeasance. That is why verification and security are so important – to ensure the correct resources reach the intended recipients in a timeous fashion.

A water-needs assessment tool was carefully designed to determine the water requirements of each site. Implementation partners managed to conduct this assessment at the majority of sites, despite the tight timeframes. However, when Ilifa received the data electronically, the site location data was unclear. Field monitors had provided names of ECD sites, names of site owners, and a general idea of location, but there was otherwise no specific geospatial data on the exact location of the sites. The service provider worked with partners to try to identify as many sites as possible by calling site managers and scoping the areas themselves. But in the end, some sites missed out because of ambiguous data.

In this type of work, it’s important to compile databases that include unique identifiers, good geospatial data and up-to-date contact information for ECD site staff.

Strong systems prevent misuse of resources

2 The humanitarian crisis facing the ECD sector and children in project communities influenced these urgent timelines.

Data challenges during a crisis can be ameliorated if accurate and up-to-date records are gathered on an ongoing basis and kept in a format which can be easily shared. ECD programme managers should also be trained and encouraged to use simple electronic tools such as Google Forms, which they can complete and submit regularly, keeping accurate records of all staff, records of payment, employment contracts, etc.

Innovative payment systems such as digital vouchers can work to channel government or private sector funding to selected beneficiaries through verified sites. Ideally, digital vouchers must be easy to operate and user-friendly to minimise the amount of support needed by beneficiaries to receive and redeem the vouchers at a large scale.

Ongoing monitoring6 7

Ensure delivery systems are user-friendly

The voucher programme was a core activity in the project that took up most of the budget and capacity of all project partners. Although the voucher system worked for most of the beneficiaries, who received their vouchers and were able to use them, there were some challenges where 15% of beneficiaries did not receive their vouchers. These challenges included cellphone network problems; lost or stolen phones and vouchers being deleted or misplaced. Some of these individuals needed their voucher PINs resent, and others needed their numbers changed because the number provided had been incorrect.

Those working on the project had to process these requests manually so it became necessary to invest more resources in the voucher system in response to the day-to-day challenges that arose in the early stages of implementation.

Any voucher system designed for urgent social relief must be able to handle complexity. Although high-tech solutions tend to be more secure, they can be too complex for beneficiaries to use. The implementing partners tried to address this issue by providing on-the-ground support through field workers, but pandemic social distancing regulations meant this was not always possible.

POSITIVE OUTCOME: INCREASED DIGITAL AND FINANCIAL LITERACY

The voucher programme pushed many of the recipients to use their phones and technology on a higher level than before. For many ECD site managers, the practice of receiving a voucher on their phone and redeeming it at a spaza shop made them more familiar with digital transactions – a skill that would place them in good stead as the financial services sector becomes increasingly digital.

Monitoring and evaluation were fundamental to ensure that the funds were spent and the support had the desired impact on ECD sites, staff and children, but also to learn vital lessons to strengthen the sector.

The project was implemented during the peak of the second wave of COVID-19 which caused major concerns and disruptions in the country. This made field visits difficult. The field monitors could not travel around as freely or safely as was planned, which impacted their ability to quickly conduct all their site visits.

Alternative, flexible means of monitoring and supporting sites can be put in place by using social media and technology. Using local forums can also improve field capacity.

Sites in urban areas are easy for partners’ field monitors to visit frequently, but in large rural provinces this is harder to do because of geographical distances. Therefore, in some areas, NGOs may require additional human capacity, such as volunteers to provide an expanded range of support and monitoring.

EVERY CHILD THE BENEFIT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

PROPOSALS

FOR THE FUTURE

Often the biggest hurdle during a crisis is the effective distribution of resources. Below are four proposals that can help to ensure this occurs.

Ensure stronger information systems

Strong systems for gathering, storing and making available up-to-date and accurate information are needed to support voucher or payment systems at a systemic level.

NECESSARY SCAFFOLDING

This learning brief provides an illustration of how an underresourced, largely informal sector made up of microsubsistencebased enterprises, was provided with the resources and support necessary to withstand a crisis. However, it is important to note that if any sector is to be able to act on the lessons learnt it will need to work in partnership with government and other stakeholders to ensure that the necessary scaffolding is in place.

This means considering the inequalities in access to banking and digital communication systems, and the circumstances and preferences of beneficiaries.

Consider connectivity

Payment systems need to take context into account in their design. Something as simple as geographic location can dramatically affect a person’s ability to cash in a voucher. Vouchers received via SMS work better in an urban context where connectivity is strong and there are more shops available.

Learning brief developed by Daniella Horwitz in conjunction with Ilifa Labantwana.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, South African NGOs proved to be crucial conduits of relief and support. When the state partners with experienced NGOs in a crisis, it can benefit from the systems and structures already in place, and reach more beneficiaries without incurring further logistical expenses.

This is the learning experience of:

Take beneficiaries’ lived realities into account

Government should partner with NGOs to ensure capability in a crisis

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