Cotlands celebrates female entrepreneurs in early childhood development
Cotlands celebrates female entrepreneurs in early childhood development (ECD) by raising awareness of the need for more skilled ECD practitioners and the important role that these women play within our communities. As South Africa's leading authority on accredited ECD training through the CotlandsIgnite™ platform, the organisation understands the needs of young children, and the challenges ECD practitioners face. CotlandsIgnite™ is a robust, online ECD learning programme that is building a skilled workforce for the future.
Businesses that sponsor CotlandsIgnite™ learners can optimise their B-BBEE scores by funding unemployed and disabled ECD practitioners. This is the only way to achieve the highest possible B-BBEE rating.
CotlandsIgnite™ offers a high-impact social investment for businesses. Cotlands’ methodology has been proven in independent studies to achieve the most significant improvement in early childhood development for South Africa’s at-risk children.
The Department of Basic Education released the 2021 Early Childhood Development (ECD) Census results which reports that the ECD sector employs 198,361 staff members across 42,420 ECD centres. There is an average of 3.9 members that comprise of the teaching staff. Only 52% of the teaching staff have a relevant NQF qualification and close to a quarter (22%) of the teaching and managerial staff working in the sector do not have a relevant ECD qualification. Cotlands plays a vital role in the development of ECD practitioners and empowering them with the knowledge and skills to deliver quality early learning programmes to children in their communities.
Women play an integral role in developing young children and promoting resilience to nurture our future generations. ECD is an opportunity to enable women to participate more meaningfully in the economy as entrepreneurs and skilled practitioners. To this end, CotlandsIgnite™ provides not only educational training, but also vital organisational and business skills (including digital literacy fundamentals) to empower practitioners to provide professional and quality services to the children and their communities.
CotlandsIgnite™ is a fully accredited online learning programme for ECD practitioners. The interactive platform bridges the technology and accessibility gaps that many other ECD training programmes fail to address. CotlandsIgnite™ offers a QCTO accredited Level 4 Occupational Certificate in Early Childhood. CotlandsIgnite™ also offers a Seta accredited New Venture Creation course to support practitioners wanting to specialise in toy librarianship. The course equips them with additional business skills to set up toy libraries in their communities, as well as manage and market play-based early learning programmes.
The programme, designed by leading experts, is the result of Cotlands’ 86 years of experience of caring for South Africa’s most vulnerable children.
CEO of Cotlands, Dr Monica Stach, comments: “Children develop 50% of their lifetime’s learning capacity before the age of 7, but more than a million children between 3 and 5 years old don’t have access to early learning programmes. South Africa needs at least 350,000 practitioners to meet our growing needs. Developing a nationwide focus on capacitating the ECD workforce is imperative to fostering future leaders and professionals.”
To find out more about the CotlandsIgnite programme, please visit: https://www.cotlands.org.
