In township backyards and rural kitchens, they pull on aprons, stir porridge pots and eventually greet small, sleepy faces with love and warmth that makes them feel welcome and at home.

Many of these women are "gogos" caring for grandchildren so that their own adult children can catch early taxis to jobs miles away. Others are employees and volunteers at early learning centres. All spend every day holding the hands that will one day hold our nation's future. They are seldom, if ever in the news — but their work is nothing short of heroic.

The scale of this quiet army of ECD educators, carers and entrepreneurs is larger than most people realise. The last national ECD Census, completed in February 2022 counted over 42 400 early learning programmes serving about 1.66-million enrolled children, and staffed by nearly 200 000 people. These figures have undoubtedly risen in the past three years. Current estimates by Ilifa Labantwana suggest that around 250 000 people (mostly women) are employed in the sector, and the vast majority of them earn below the minimum wage.

Behind this "formal" ECD system is an even bigger layer of unpaid care. Stats SA reports that about 6.7-million grandparents live with around 9.7-million children. Nearly 70% of those grandparents are grandmothers who are caring for their grandchildren while their own children go to work. That's a massive invisible workforce that is enabling millions of people to participate in the economy.

Women's Month is an appropriate time to recognise this network of female carers, ECD practitioners and micro entrepreneurs for the essential role they play in South Africa's development story. However, we need to go beyond praising these women to catalyse meaningful action to support and enable them. The imperative for this becomes patently clear when you look at the data on our nation's smallest citizens.

According to the 2024 Thrive by Five Index, fewer than half of four to five-year-olds in early learning programmes are meeting the full set of milestones that prepare them for school. Only 43% are on track in both healthy physical growth and early learning skills like language, problem-solving and motor development. If we look at early learning skills alone, the figure rises slightly to 45.7%, but that still means that more than half of SA's children are starting their schooling years already behind. These figures remind us that consistent, nurturing care in the early years is a national priority, not a side issue.

Fortunately, there was some good news on the funding front recently, when the Minister of Finance confirmed an additional R10-billion for ECD over the medium term, effectively raising the centre-based subsidy from R17 to R24 per child per day (the first increase in six years) and expanding access to 700 000 more children. But it is still not nearly enough to meet the growing need. The new R24 per day rate still falls well short of the estimated per-child cost of a basic quality programme, and only about a third of eligible children currently receive that subsidy.

Clearly, there is much work, and funding, still to be done. The R24 subsidy needs to be assessed and increased every year, and structures and processes need to be put in place to ensure that money actually reaches the ECD centres on time and with a minimum of red tape.

It's also vital that the Department of Basic Education's 2030 Strategy for ECD gets the full support it needs to bring more community and home-based sites into the formal system. Registration backlogs keep many programmes outside the subsidy net, but there are efforts underway to rectify this, like the eCares platform and the Bana Pele registration drive — a call to action to put children first and an encouragement to all micro entrepreneurs and ECD practitioners to register and get the support the need to give children the development and stimulation they deserve.

This work mirrors the national call that emerged from the G20 Education Indaba to move beyond scattered pilot projects and instead prioritise quality foundational learning and accelerate the registration of ECD centres. These aren't just policy goals; they are the practical steps needed to ensure that vital support and funding reaches ECD classrooms and informal centres across the country.

Of course, while much attention rightly must be given to raising awareness about the good work being done by educators, ECD practitioners and entrepreneurs, as a country, we need to also recognise the millions of women working as cleaners, childminders, homemakers and au pairs.

This Women's Month, they deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated in the same way that we do our nation's female lawyers, doctors, engineers and CEOs. Ultimately, we need to recognise and support the entire network of care that underpins our early childhood development ecosystem and thank the women who teach first songs, soothe first fears and open the gates to learning at dawn — because they are building the future of our country.

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*Image courtesy of contributor