The Centre for Social Development (CSD) at Rhodes University was recently placed among the top five in the country in the category of best Training and Support organisation for 2012.
The Centre for Social Development (CSD) at Rhodes University was recently placed among the top five in the country in the category of best Training and Support organisation for 2012.
This award forms part of the National Absa Early Childhood Development awards held annually across all nine provinces.
They acknowledge the important roles that the various stakeholders including CSD, early childhood development practitioners and facilitators play in investing in the future of young children through quality programmes.
Established in August 1981, the Centre’s primary focus was to create an awareness of the importance of education in a community in which children had no access to care and education of any kind.
In 1997, an early childhood development (ECD) pilot project initiated by the Department of Education was launched to test out a different way of offering children an extra year of education.
Interim ECD policy and curriculum framework guidelines were developed and CSD’s focus became more streamlined towards providing educational and management training for ECD practitioners in line with policy and framework at that time.
Through experiential learning the CSD realised that although much time, effort and resources are invested through training, the communities from which these practitioners come must be ready to sustain and support the changes and ideas they bring.
The task of training ECD practitioners and establishing sufficient and quality facilities and resources was and still remains a huge demand in the Eastern Cape.
The prize – they were placed fourth – was awarded to CSD for their current training model.
This is one of integrated participatory development that consists of ECD and community development training.
It ensures that community practitioners combine their efforts with those of ECD practitioners to act as catalytic drivers for community development processes, translating into the improved well-being of children and their families.
This approach is one of a social development paradigm rather than a narrow educational one.
The following organisations were involved in the early childhood development awards:
- Absa
- SA Congress for Early Childhood Development
- The National Development Agency
- The Department of Social Development and the Department of Education
The prize money was sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund.
