Over the last decade, SmartStart’s has achieved remarkable growth, evolving from a modest network of franchisees serving a few thousand children into a powerful national collective. Today, the organisation partners with 12 implementing organisations to empower over 15 000 practitioners, delivering quality early learning to more than 150 000 children every week across South Africa’s underserved communities.
A journey of scale and innovation
What began with four playgroups has become a pioneering force in early childhood development, reshaping the conversation around early learning as both a societal priority and economic necessity. SmartStart’s social franchise model taps into the strengths of local communities, training under-employed women to establish social enterprises in their homes and community spaces. This approach reaches children right where they are, proving that affordable, community-led solutions can deliver profound results without massive infrastructure investments. We have demonstrated resilience and innovation, adapting through challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and adjusting our model to reflect learning and to better position us for scale. Crucially, we have built strong partnerships with government, creating new opportunities to build systemic delivery solutions, and to dismantle the structural barriers that undervalue the assets of low-income communities.
Proven impact and child outcomes
At the heart of our approach is a deep respect for community wisdom. Women in townships and rural areas, often overlooked, now run sustainable early learning programmes with SmartStart’s training and support, fostering not just child development but also economic empowerment for families. Recent child outcomes evaluations underscore this success, revealing significant developmental gains for children in SmartStart programmes, alongside a substantial narrowing of the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income children.
Our vision for the next decade
Looking ahead, SmartStart aims to evolve into an open platform that strengthens the entire early learning ecosystem. By sharing our assets as public goods, we will maximise agency for practitioners, parents, and partners, extending our model across South Africa, and beyond. This shift from a closed network to a collaborative ecosystem catalyst and enabler promises even greater scale, ensuring that early learning becomes a cornerstone of national progress.
