Question NW702 to the Minister of Social Development

Reply:

The Vangasali campaign is progressing fairly well and is scheduled to continue until at least end of March 2022. There are three phases to Vangasali, the first was data collection which happened between June and October 2020 and resulted in a database of 52,288 ECD services which includes centre and non-centre based services.

Phase 2 focussed on orientation of provincial, district and local officials from DSD and Environmental Practitioners at local level in preparation for phase 3.

The Phase 3 will then focus on the registration massification which will commence in 2021/22 financial year.

(a)Current status on registration:

PROVINCE	(i) NUMBER OF FULLY REGISTERED	(ii)NUMBER OF CONDITIONALLY REGISTERED	(iii)NUMBER OF UNREGISTERED SERVICES
EC	1 174	1 816	1 685
FS	310	972	1 674
GP	1 242	624	13 717
KZN	1 696	1 854	4 516
LP	478	3 021	2 695
MP	578	919	3 011
NC	95	197	660
NW	386	842	2 188
WC	850	635	4 839
TOTAL	6 423	10 880	34 985

 

(b)(i) The campaign was a success as the department was able to get the data base of the majority of ECD services that are not registered. This will assist the department in planning on assisting those services to be supported to register.

This database will be used in phase 2 of the project to drive registration massification and verify the existence of all these services.

Phase 2 began in October 2020 and builds on the great collaboration with Department of Health, Environmental Health Directorate that has been ongoing over the last four years. Phase 2 has so far resulted in the following:

• Orientation of 474 DSD officials and 160 Environmental Health officials on the Vangasali Registration Toolkit in all 52 districts/metropolitan municipalities
• Vangasali Social Service Professionals Manual on ECD Registration has been developed.
• 22,000 Standardised Vangasali ECD Registration Application Packs (available in 7 official languages) were printed and will be distributed to DSD Districts by end March 2021.
• ECD Registration Framework Rollout for ECD Service Assessment Visits has been developed
• Online ECD Registration Management Tool has been developed.
• Registration Jamborees have begun in 4 provinces and the remaining provinces will begin registration Jamborees this month once the ECD stimulus administration is complete. We are targeting 10,000 new ECD services to enter the registration system in the next 12 months.

Phase 3 of Vangasali is in the planning phase and involves bringing sector wide collaboration on resourcing and improving infrastructure at ECD services, drawing in the private sector, civil society and government resources into a focused effort on improving ECD services directly in line with norms and standards.

(ii) Some of the challenges that have been identified during the campaign include amongst the other:

• Duplications
• Missing information on the data base that makes it difficult to follow up on the service to be assisted.

The data has been cleaned to deal with the duplicates. The data is now instrumental during verification process on the ECD Stimulus Relief Package to check the applicants against the Vangasali data base.