The Status of ECD Financing in Six SADC Countries: National Budgeting, Aid Allocation and ECD Learning Costs

In the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, the Minimum Package of Services for Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children and Youth framework adopted in 2015 has progressively made governments establish and commit more to national policies. Visible national education budgets must include Early Childhood Development (ECD), although allocations to pre-school programmes are still grossly underbudgeted and inequitably distributed, showing varying trends in different countries – largely affected by fiscal considerations, macroeconomic environment, and policy priorities in SADC.  

Globally, ECD and education is among the most underfunded sub-sectors, with estimates suggesting that spending on one year of high quality pre-primary education alone must increase annually from US$4.8 billion in 2012 to US$31.2 billion annually on average between 2015 and 2030 to reach this target. With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to meet requirements of SDG4 target 4.2, we are at a critical point at which insight into how to finance ECD is needed. 

There exist insufficient budgets and cost of educating an ECD learner, with available information being inaccurate and incomparable. Experts estimate that a minimum public investment of 1% of GDP is required for the provision of quality early childhood care and education. Combining the public investments required for the education, health, and protection interventions within ECD is estimated between 2% and 2.5% of GDP. Despite these estimates, domestic governments are only spending an average of 0.01% of GDP on ECD. 

International aid for ECD has grown in volume, but still remains shockingly low, with only 1.4% of aid allocated to pre-primary education. The UK and USA, two of the top three donors to basic education, have invested very little in ECD and growth in multilateral aid for ECD has primarily been driven by the World Bank. 

The SADC governments have developed policy and legislation around ECD yet it remains largely provided by the private sector, churches, and other institutions, at a cost which is prohibitive to the majority of children.  

ECD education financing  

In the six SADC countries (Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe), levels of national budget allocations and actual expenditures to education in general and ECD in particular, remain inadequate in most countries, a signal that the progressive ECD-focused policies have not yet been fully translated into significant budgetary allocations. Public finance management systems are at varying levels of development in adopting a programme-based budgeting format, which is outcome-oriented and useful for allowing governments to trace the child-focused outcomes based on the resources that have been allocated and spent.  

The average national education budget as a percentage of the total national budget over the period 2016 to 2021, as well as the regional average, show that only Lesotho (20.71%) and Mozambique (23.06%) had budget allocations that exceed both the regional and global budget commitments of 16.5% and 20%. The main contributions to the excess is due to focused education sector plans anchored on costed budgets supported by government and donor funding partners. 

ECD donor aid distribution 2015-2022 

While there is a wide range of donors funding ECD in the SADC region, the funding levels differ from country to country and from donor to donor, with nutrition and education receiving the most funding. However, within the education sub-sector, infrastructure as well as safety and security receive the least funding.  

Lesotho received the highest and most balanced amount with US$1,096.66 million (69%) of US$1,586.881 million over the period, of which US$629.11 million was for education. Malawi and Lesotho were most funded for nutrition with US$400.8 and US$342.15 million respectively for 2017 to 2022.   

Cost of educating an ECD learner  

Per-capita spending on ECD in SADC Countries  

The average per capita spending on ECD learners for countries in the SADC region is US$138 but for these six countries it is US$80, with only Eswatini (US$217) and Lesotho (US$109) being above average compromising the quality of ECD services available to children in these countries, and as a result their readiness for the first level of primary school is minimised.  

The research study found that information regarding costs are rather fragmented as some countries have identified costs related to some specific cost centres and not others. The research used available information on specific cost centres of learning materials; provision of meals/nutrition; personnel at ECD centres; and basic maintenance costs excluding costs related to infrastructure provision for ECD centres.  

The current average regional cost for an ECD learner is US$292 with South Africa (US$435) and Zimbabwe (US$392) being the lead when excluding infrastructure. The indicative costs for infrastructure construction provision are factored in for Zimbabwe (US$5,000) and Mozambique (US$597) reflecting a basic cost which is not all inclusive as information for other countries was unavailable.  

Conclusion and recommendations 

ECD is grossly underfunded with most funds being recurrent, especially employment related and the majority of support from private and community organisations. Some countries are dominated by donor aid, such as Malawi and Lesotho from World Bank and UNICEF respectively. 

ECD budgeting needs to be direct in national budgets rather than through education and social welfare ministries so as to adopt a holistic and integrated approach with multisectoral mechanisms put in place. 

Funding organisations have to be equitable in fund distribution and should use child-focused support based on child costs, resulting in the successful achievement of quality programming and access in an inclusive way.  

Governments should prioritise adequate, equitable, efficient and effective disbursements, undertaken within transparent and inclusive public finance management processes towards child-focused programmes and adopt austerity measures for other expenditure related to administration.  

There is a need to improve collection, disaggregation and dissemination of budget data through observance of the dictates of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 5 (2003) on General Measures of Implementation. This should be done by collecting in real time and sharing budget allocation and utilisation data amongst all relevant stakeholders encapsulating all areas of child protection, health and education.  

Finally, there is a need to identify costs in the region dependent on the existence of basic standards that guide and define the cost centres in the provision of ECD, which would allow for more meaningful averaging at the national and regional levels.   

ESSA and the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, University of Cambridge, are currently working in partnership on an Early Childhood Development (ECD) project with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The project focuses on understanding the ecosystem of ECD researchers and their needs in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda (with desk-based research for Mozambique). 

As part of this project, we sponsored ten ECD researchers to attend the Eastern Africa Regional Early Childhood Conference (EARECC) in Tanzania in March 2024 to give them the opportunity to share their work, network and explore research collaborations.

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