South Africa's Public Expenditure & Institutional Review for Early Childhood Development — Closing the Gender Employment Gap Through Childcare

South Africa's means-tested Early Childhood Development (ECD) subsidy (R17 per child per day, paid to registered centres) moved from the Department of Social Development to the Department of Basic Education in April 2022. Between 2019 and 2022 the number of children receiving the subsidy more than doubled to roughly 1.5 million, and in January 2023 government dropped the requirement for centres to hold separate non-profit registration.

To cost and design the actions needed to reach universal quality ECD access, and to quantify the gender-employment benefits of closing the ECD access gap.

In March 2023 the DBE and the World Bank published a joint Public Expenditure and Institutional Review (PEIR), costing universal quality ECD access at roughly R11 billion a year.

Independent modelling cited in the review and the 2021 Women's Report finds that closing the ECD access gap (currently under 35% of children under six attend any early learning programme) could create over 300,000 direct jobs — most for women, since DBE's own ECD census finds women hold over 90% of posts — lift women's employment by 2.8 percentage points, and narrow the national gender employment gap from 2.8 to 0.1 points; UNICEF-linked estimates put potential new women's labour-force entrants at over one million. Investigative reporting (Daily Maverick, October 2025) found only around 30% of registered centres actually receive the state subsidy, roughly 42% of ECD programmes nationally are still unregistered, and almost 90% of ECD workers earn below minimum wage, with women in the sector earning about 30% less than men for equal work.

The reform is well-evidenced in its diagnostics and design but only partially funded in practice.