ISSA Conference 2024

The first day of the ISSA conference was filled with rich presentations and lively discussions. Words like ecosystem, networks, collaboration and systems thinking popped up regularly, but we were often reminded to keep coming back to the core focus parents/caregivers and their young children.

Sarah Perrine – CEO – Trust for Social Achievement highlighted the importance of having shared values as enablers to collaborate and catalyse positive social change. Here the 6 Cs are important to keep in mind: Curiosity to find new ways of improving development outcomes; Caring about the future; Collaboration – no individual or institution holds the answer; Community – relationships are what give us the strength to work together; Courage and Commitment.

Liana Ghent, Executive Director of ISSA, reminded us about how “It takes a village to raise a child” and in some cases this village needs support to be rebuilt. A network approach is critical to doing this, as emphasised by Liana and many other speakers during the day. This echoes Seriti aRe Bapaleng′s own focus on working with local networks of parents/caregivers to strengthen their own confidence and ability to positively support the early learning and development of the young children in their care. ECD is a complex space – networked, collaborative approaches are critically important to improve development outcomes.

In the keynote address, James Cairns from Harvard′s Centre on the Developing Child brought their recent work to the fore in this regard. They are trying to better understand the broader environment that affects early development, extending to aspects such as the natural and built environment. This work has been surfacing practical examples that illustrate that by working with different actors across the spectrum one can more effectively and efficiently address complex, multifaceted problems without having to put in new resources. Their centre has done some work with the City of Boston as they are interested in the intersection of extreme heat and the effects this has on young children and their development. In getting the ECD people and the environmental health people talking they share knowledge and were able to things through a different lens. By overlaying their maps of where heat centres are in their communities and where the ECDs are situated, they could better locate cooling centres so that families with young children could have easy access to these. This did not require any new funding but rather a different perspective bringing in different groups to more efficiently and effectively sort out holistic solutions.

How could we in South Africa be collaborating to effect social change through considering different perspectives? How can we come together to solve our complex challenges in way that does not require more resources, but rather uses what we have in a smarter way?

Today Seriti will be presenting its aRe Bapaleng Programme at the ISSA 2024 conference – Building resilient communities in South Africa through strengthening local ECD ecosystems.? We invite you to join us the Einstein Room at 12h00 if you are here in Sofia, otherwise please reach out to us for more information about our Programme and activities. ??