The Letsema Programme

Organised caregivers, communities and practitioners partnering with government and business to co-produce services for young children.

The future well-being of young children lies primarily in the hands of their communities who actively and collaboratively learn and organise to strengthen their own capabilities and resourcefulness, enabling them to more effectively engage with government and business to co-produce the vital services that young children and their caregivers require for their well-being.

The Letsema Programme is an existing working collaboration, in the Limpopo, KwaZulu Natal and the Freestate, between dozens of grassroots caregiver groups supported by networks of NGOs of the ECD Learning Community.

The Letsema Approach
The Letsema Programme combines the best of community development and rights-base approaches, while avoiding their pitfalls, going beyond limited self-help and simplistic rights-based advocacy and protest to more co-creative engagement with government and business to co-produce services for young children.

1. Child-focused grassroots caregiver groups and organisations are supported by the ECDLC-member NGOs to participate in multiple horizontal exchanges. Through this they develop solidarity and build each other’s capacities, better appreciating and strengthening their own initiative and resourcefulness;
2. As the caregivers become better connected, within and across municipalities and districts, they grow their ability to organise, building their relationships, leadership and alliances through regular gatherings. Supported by NGOs, through courses and exchanges (with e.g. SA Housing Federations) their leadership is developed, in skill and confidence. Over time, the formation of district and province-wide, federated organisations is supported;
   
3. Support from NGOs and academic institutions, they undertake enumeration and visioning processes to clarify their scope and scale, issues and resources and to build pictures of their preferred futures for their children. Leaders are supported to prepare themselves for engaging with government and business. Smaller issues are tackled to build muscle for larger issues;
   
4. At the same time government officials and businesses, responsible for working with issues affecting young children, are supported to shift their approaches from service-delivery dominated approaches to begin to incorporate co-producing approaches with communities around child services, like nutrition, health, education, safety.
   
5. Community leadership, government officials and business leaders engage in negotiation processes that lead to creating the conditions, mobilising resources and projects of co-producing services for the well-being of young children and caregivers.
   

ECDLC members in Limpopo
Golang-Kulani, Khanimamba, Thusanang Trust, Thukakgaladi, SEP, Segomonene, Faranani, Light of Mercy.

ECDLC members in the Freestate
Tshepanang HIV/AIDS Project Centre, Sekhutlong HBC, Save The Children (Freestate), Diketso Eseng Dipuo Community Development, Lesedi Educare

The current approach – “Service Delivery” to young children
The government’s “delivery model” sees citizens as entitled tax-paying consumers and voters, receiving services from representative local government and state-subsidised NGOs, coupled with an ingrained welfare system of grants which, while life-saving for many, further entrenches dependency and passivity.  

But the State and NGOs do not have the capacity to adequately  “deliver” the services communities need and are particularly failing young children.  Infant mortality and malnutrition are back to the levels experienced under Apartheid.  SA has had roughly 7000 service delivery protests per year for the past 5 years, the most of any countries in the world. Clearly a different approach is needed.

A different future
Based on the approach used by the housing federations in South Africa, we see that it is possible for communities to mobilize and engage the State in more positive ways with fruitful results.

The real work:  Unlocking the resourcefulness, leadership and initiatives of communities to learn from each other, better do what they can for themselves and from this to seek co-producing relationships and initiatives with government and business.

Current foci

• Networking NGOs and helping to shift their practice paradigms away from short-term projects towards long-term community mobilization, to facilitating and supporting the social change initiatives of caregivers and their communities. Engaging NGO practitioner’s will to work differently.
  
• Laying the groundwork for community-community solidarity and leadership identification, through multiple horizontal exchanges.
  
• Leadership development: we are preparing a 3-module programme for the leaders of the caregiver groups and for their supporting practitioners, including an exchange to India, to begin later this year.  This group will become a seeding resource for the development of other leadership.
  

Resourcing Letsema
Letsema, as a programme of the ECD Learning Community, began in Limpopo in 2011 with seed funding from the Bernard van Leer Foundation. It is coordinated by the Community Development Resource Association. 

Further funding is required. For more information please contact Nomvula Dlamini - nomvula@cdra.org.za