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[Sid]

Hi. Welcome to The exChange Podcast, where we dive into stories of system orchestrators and their journey of exponential change. Today I have with me Preeti, who heads Networks and Partnerships at C4EC and Grace, the CEO of SmartStart. Hi. Welcome, Grace.

Thank you. Grace, if you could just briefly tell us about who you are and your journey, till you got to SmartStart. And after that, we’ll dive into stories of SmartStart and your work at SmartStart. Good morning. And thank you for having me. 

[Grace]

Yeah. I’m Grace Matlhape. I come from Johannesburg, South Africa. I think of myself as a social entrepreneur, as an innovator around some of the world’s most intractable challenges. That’s what attracts me. I started my professional life as a mental health professional. So I even worked in a psychiatric hospital for a few years. 

But that was the environment that really developed a deep interest in me in understanding, you know, the depth of struggles and despair that people live with and what drives that. You know, at that time, I was working in an environment where we established a strong relationship with one individual and helped them through their challenges. 

But it became very clear to me, very soon after that, that there’s so much more in our lives that influences the way we end up showing up in the world. That’s the thing that attracted me to the world of social justice, really, which is how I see myself these days as well.

[Preeti]

And, Grace, I’ve been working with you now for a year or more, and I’m just always curious about why ECD (Early Childhood Development). What was the problem that you saw in ECD that really mattered to you so much that you moved into SmartStart? And what is the landscape of ECD in South Africa?

[Grace]

Yeah, it’s slightly personal. Before I got into ECD, I worked in HIV prevention. So South Africa was really deeply impacted by HIV and struggled a lot to understand, again, those drivers of HIV risk. It was obvious to us. I was in HIV prevention. So that’s obvious to us that just building awareness, telling people the facts, is not enough. 

There’s so much more that influences the decisions people make. In particular, the things that make the risk of HIV withtaking at a certain moment. And so, you know, working with young people, there was that big thing I was aware of that I’m still aware of. That’s about how we are wired, how we think, how we show up, the self-esteem, the pressure of context on people’s lives, the pressure of the things that they have to deal with in their own lives, and, you know, just making risk worth taking. 

And so, I did not conceptualise SmartStart, but I was invited to be part of SmartStart by my predecessor in my previous job. And, you know, the way he put it was, he and I had always been in search of how we can get to young people early enough? Early enough. And the truth is, the earlier the better, in order for human beings to be well-rounded, well-prepared humans for the challenges that life will present, not just challenges, but to present opportunities for life for human beings. 

Like, really getting to the bottom of what lies is the potential for every human being that’s born. And so, you know, I was attracted to ECD and I read up about it. It’s like overnight and the following day, I woke up and I thought, “Why didn’t I know this?” Like, it’s so obvious that some of the world’s biggest challenges can be prevented or solved early on in a human being’s life. I joined SmartStart as a massively new, completely in someone’s brain’s new startup.

[Preeti]

Which is great because you’ve kind of entered this with a complete beginner’s mindset, right- open to as many possibilities. You’ve just said it so rightly that all the problems we are trying to solve in the world later on in life are because we haven’t solved the problem of ECD. And it’s so critical that we need to look at the early years in a broader lens, not just as learning, but care, development. 

[Sid]

It’s a foundational time. 

[Preeti]

And a lot of information also about what pans out in our lives today in terms of mental health, trauma, everything comes back to your early years. And yeah, so thank you for doing what you do. And I’m so glad you made this shift into the early childhood space. [Grace] So am I. 

[All speakers]

So, you know, speaking of young people, there’s one game that my colleague kind of planned for us to do, And, it’s something that we should get into right away. Okay. So this is the game of Pictionary, which is essentially: We pick out a word and draw that. And while one person is drawing the other two people guess. So I’m going to start with Preeti. These are essentially words that we picked out from the work that you do. It’s not typical words from Pictionary. So Preeti, this is your word. So, I draw and who guesses? Grace and I will guess. Okay. Education?

Child? Early Childhood Education.

That was easy.

Not for the person who is drawing. Okay, I’ll pick one.

This is tough. Moving from one to another. Shift? No.

In our sprint, is it? Something to do with the work Grace does. But it’s a model. Social Franchise. This looks like a box in a box.

Okay. Let’s see what I have here. Connections? Community? Networks? Is it around networks? No. Is it ecosystem? Yes. Okay. 

[Sid]

The other pieces, I mean, I want to kind of unpack is how you have had these mindset shifts of becoming the spokesperson for ECD and I think Preeti kind of started that conversation. And I want to just go back to your time as a mental health practitioner, and you kind of call that out as well. How do you kind of see yourself having evolved in your own head and to see yourself reach a point where you say, “No, this is what I really want to do, and this is where foundational problems are?” Yeah. So I mean, that’s the interesting journey that I want to unpack. So if you could just take us through that a little bit.

[Grace]

So, I think there are a few pathways into that, like just my way of thinking about myself. I

think the one way of thinking about it is that the journey is a journey that started with an interest in human beings, one individual at a time. And over time, I have seen that there’s enough commonality in the problems that people are struggling with that actually,, the best way to approach it is In terms of collective terms. 

And then even within that. So, from a mental health worker who focuses on establishing a relationship with one individual and helping them meet that challenge to looking at, what are the common challenges that groups of people experience in society, but actually beyond challenges, what are the opportunities? 

What could we be focusing on that just changes the future for the better? But over time, I think my more recent, way of thinking as I started to work with C4EC is actually is not just thinking about myself and my group of people, my organisation, as one solution, but how could multiple solutions impact a problem better? 

Working at an ecosystem level where what brings us together is our common commitment to the problem, rather than trying to drive one solution for change, that feels like one of the most pivotal shift in the last, in the recent years, actually.

[Preeti]

I remember one conversation we were having and you also mentioned that social franchising model could be one way of doing. And that was an Aha moment, I think even for us. You know, it’s that there are many more possibilities like you said. So going on that, I just feel like now that we’ve been on this co-travelling journey together and there has been this shift. 

I remember that in one of our first few sessions, when Sanjay was drawing out the graph, and, on the x-axis, on the one side there was systems resources. On the other side, there was SmartStart Resources, and the y-axis on top, was being an orchestrator and influencer, and bottom was being an implementer. And I think that diagram we were all like, you know, seeing where we thought and each one had a different idea of it, where you were orchestrating. 

You also have many partner organisations. So you were orchestrating a bit but everything was heavily dependent on you. And so, can we just talk about your thinking from where we started, where we are placed now?

[Grace]

So let me start by telling you just very briefly, this SmartStart journey, the journey of the organisation itself. So it was clear when we started, we are an implementer. We are implementing a set of solutions to solve the challenge of access to quality early learning for children. And in the early years already we realised that, this is a deep problem. Like I said again, it’s much more than just about setting up new supply, which is what we do.

We recruit unemployed women. We set them up to deliver quality early learning from their homes or centres around where they live. A very powerful model. We have evidence of good child outcomes coming out of it. We even have evidence of, you know, ability to replicate and to grow this model. We really an. We grew from very small number. We are now at a large number of franchisees across South Africa. However, the thing that just stood in the way of progress, the way we had envisaged it, is that at the, you know, behind the challenge of ECD in South Africa, really is poverty. 

What predicts exclusion of children is the fact that their parents cannot afford to pay the fees, and the practitioners in the communities cannot afford to get registered with government because it requires so much more capital investment than is available in those communities. So that means that the poorest children are the ones excluded. The poorest entrepreneurs who deliver quality are the ones that will never get funding from the state because they never register. 

So it became clear that you’re working with the problem that is held in place by a system that isn’t shifting n the direction of children. So we had to, you know, so we we needed at that point to work with government. In a way, Starting to work with government, to say, this is how we understand the biggest excluders of children in South Africa, started to shift us from just being an implementer to influencing policy in a bigger way. And once you work with government, you are confronted with if you’re doing the things you do as part of a government partnership, you have to give up attribution. It’s no longer about SmartStart. It’s now about what is good for the country. 

And so that journey of shifting from implementing to influencing and attribution to contribution starts to open up- So now you are in partnership with government. Government is interested in all solutions. So are we. Because what we want to do is to try and solve this problem. And so I can actually see how we started to shift from that implementer to influencer. But the platform itself is a partnership. So we work in partnership with other non-governmental organisations throughout South Africa who have very deep local knowledge of the communities that they focus on, but also really deep knowledge of early childhood development. 

They themselves bring models that work, and, so that in our work with them, we really have also been an orchestrator. But, orchestrator within a defined network. But it’s just when you sit back and observe what has happened in the last few months, our work with this network of NGOs, our work with the government, has just started to shift. that focus, like head down to head up and how we are able to impact the whole country, not just with SmartStart solution but multiple other solutions available to us. So that’s wonderful. 

[Sid]

What was interesting of what you said right now is how you move from attribution to contribution. Yeah. I’m coming in from an outside perspective. I just want to understand. When you move to being a contributor, and I think and this is the marketer in me speaking, when you give up on attribution, you give up on a lot of measurement as well. I’m assuming so. So, if that happens, how do you validate for success?

[Grace]

Well, I mean, you know, there’s a big, sort of evidence pestering inside me that just struggles with the idea of giving up on measurement. Absolutely not. There’s no way that we give up on measurement. 

But the mindset shift is that you are not doing measurement; you’re not doing your evaluation in order to prove that your model works, you’re doing an evaluation in order to contribute to the learning for the whole ecosystem. But we have to continue to build evidence. We have to know that the things that we are investing so much energy and time on are going to get us faster, are going to get these child outcomes and child outcomes at scale for all children in South Africa who are excluded.

[Sid]

The other question that I had was because it was one interesting conversation that I was having yesterday with Stephanie from BRAC International, was that, and I feel that it’s a little circular. And I feel when, when I hear you speak, I sense that if people are in absolute poverty, education is something that- if you’re focusing on children to be educated at the right time there, it’s the ability to get them out of poverty and graduate out of poverty. But at the same time, because they’re poor, they don’t have the right access. So how do you kind of solve for that circular problem? 

[Grace]

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly the opportunity in the early years. You know, so even though the parents of these children are still in poverty today, they know what they want for their children and all parents, we spoke with realise how important education is for their children. It’s when things like the affordability of that education are keeping children away, then the poverty will hold children in poverty, you know, poverty will hold them in poverty. So that is the opportunity we have. We have to get the children who are in the poorest context, all children, but really favouring the most excluded. We’ve got to get them out of poverty through early education.

And all children are born with powerful potential. And that is the moment that they still are all as equal as you can get human beings to be at that time. And that feels like the most powerful opportunity for us to achieve the change we want.

[Preeti]

I think also the opportunity that you unlocked with what you were saying with all parents have aspirations for their children and they want a different life from what they have experienced and how you’ve seen that as an abundant factor in your work. And use that to get all the women, as many women, in any space to run an early childhood learning centre. I think that was a wonderful model that you have really unlocked. So, taking care and ensuring that the mother is also earning and is able to provide and also, her child is also able to learn and have access to early learning. 

[Grace]

And then, drawing from the unemployed women to make sure that they can make a livelihood from doing one of the most powerful public services anyone could do, you know, so ou can see that as a triple impact; impacting the parents, enabling her to to go seek employment, impacting the child in the long term by investing in the human capital development, impacting the entrepreneur who’s running the preschool from their home in making sure that they make a livelihood from a life of unemployment and poverty to actual real revenue generation in their homes. 

[Preeti]

Can you tell us a few stories of any of your practitioners or your franchisers who sort of shifted their life and they’ve seen so much of difference in the way they live now and what this means to them?

[Grace]

So there are so many stories. I mean, I have met women, so this one and this is their real name, her name is Sibongile. Sibongile was in her late 20s when she joined SmartStart in the early years. She had been unemployed for a while. And when we met her, she just lost her husband, so she was rather, you know, destitute. We met her. We put her through the matching process, which is our own screening process to make sure that this is the right person and all, it’s like a four-hour process. 

You know, she was really quite emotionally low. I mean, she had reason to be. She had just lost her husband. She was unemployed, depressed, and she had, I think she had three children, 2 or 3 children at that time. And, you know. Yeah. So she was excited to be part of SmartStart. But I remember her because she showed up with so much unhappiness like the absence of joy in her whole demeanour. I went to visit the site about 3 to 4 months after she had been set up. I was hosting a few partners that wanted to see what SmartStart looks like in the field. And I was blown away by just; you know, I am a mental health professional, so I see that very quickly. The whole, you know, mental health. That’s right. Yeah. I was blown away. 

So the sentence I’ll never forget that I heard from Sibongile was, “A few months ago. I was a nobody.” I’m using her words. She says, “A few months ago, I was a nobody And since SmartStart came into my life, I am visible in this community. People come to me for advice about their children.” Now, clearly she isn’t really an expert in 3 or 4 months, but the belief in herself has always stayed with me. 

So needless to say, I continue to go and see how she’s doing. And you know, she hasn’t grown as fast as many adults that I know. Others have grown much faster from being, a practitioner with six children in one classroom, many adults now built a second classroom or third classroom in their backyard, or moved into a church holding the neighbourhood. 

But Sibongile has grown, she’s employing two practitioners now- one is running the one class, the other one is a part time assistant and a cook, like she’s building an enterprise. You know, these are the stories we hear. We hear stories, we meet people who are, not, passive beneficiaries. We meet people who are active agents of change, first in themselves and in the communities that they serve.

[Preeti]

And thank you so much for sharing this. Yeah, It makes everything so worthwhile, right? [Sid]

So, Grace, if we could just kind of go back to you for a second and, to see your journey and when you witness these pieces and it’s so important for you to be also be able to learn from the stories of kind of struggle and move on and see that How have those things kind of affected you as a leader, and how many of those things have you been able to imbibe and bring back to SmartStart?

[Grace]

You know, so the first one is, you know, when I joined, I did join with that sense that, you know, changing the world. And so, you know, that arrogance. And then being met with such power, such unrecognised power that lies in these people, in the communities that that we serve, that they first show up not as beneficiaries, as I say, but as partners to work with us, to enable access to quality early learning, that changed me completely as a person. 

And, you know, that is something that has helped SmartStart especially in our journey with C4EC, to start thinking of the unemployed women in South Africa that work with their homes, that they bring all of that, as assets And, as you were saying, Preeti, this is the thing that, when I started to work with C4EC, you put it into words as, making the abundant effective and the scarce irrelevant. And that is such a owerful naming of the things I was seeing and the things that were changing me. 

And these are all of the assets we already have in South Africa. There’s massive numbers of unemployed women in South Africa who love children, who have the proper potential to be a teacher and an agent, and seeing them as the asset that is in abundance to work with, it has been a really powerful transformer, in me, like, transforms my own thinking and the way I have approached my work, but I think SmartStart’s whole approach again, you know, of each one of those people is a node of investment to reach more and more parents who themselves are node of investment to reach more and more. 

So you start seeing how replication actually is driven by people who had the conviction. 

[All speakers]

Yeah, like a dandelion. That’s right. It is exactly like a dandelion. Another thing that I credit C4EC for making me aware of. Yeah.

[Sid]

Speaking of your journey with C4EC, I think, a question for both of you because I wasn’t there as a part of that. I think you’ve been through the sprint process and you’ve kind of engaged with C4EC on those bits. And I think during one of the sprints you kind of went through, you were discussing uncertainties. Yeah. Yes. And when you talk about uncertainties and I also,say that as a tether to your goal of 2030, what are the kind of major or most significant uncertainties that you unpacked that day? And this is a question to both of you.

[Grace]

Why don’t you start, Preeti? 

[Preeti]

I think it was interesting when we said, you know, the mission wanted to reach all children in the 3 to 5 years, especially those excluded, because I remember one statement you had made when we were presenting long back, you had said, we’re scaling, we’re growing, but we’re really not reaching the children we need to reach. It’s constantly growing and there’s no problem with that. 

So, SmartStart didn’t have a problem. You didn’t need to disrupt anything, right? That stuck with me. And I was like, yes, like we see numbers doubling, but you’re really not reaching who needs it. And then when we started unpacking that, especially with the focus on those excluded children, then we looked at the challenges and the uncertainties that lie ahead. It seemed like so many. And then we started crystallising, crystallising and came to like the seven challenges. 

And, like you said, the top challenge being unlocking, making it, you know- we wanted to unlock the informal sector because that’s in abundance. Yes. That’s right. Yeah. If you unlock that, you unlock love, you unlock, opening homes for centres. And when the heart is open, the space is open. 

[Grace]

The other one, if I remember well, earlier, I think we identified a doubt at that point around political will. Yes. Yeah, I remember, and that is such a powerful thing for me right now to remember, because that’s the one thing that started to see shift in South Africa. It probably was always shifting through the way that we were doing, but not evident. But suddenly in the last few months, I know you were asking us about what the uncertainties are, but this one has become a bit more certain.

[Sid]

That’s great. I mean, I think that’s the shift that you’d like to see as well. How uncertainty shifts to, “Well, I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

[Grace]

It’s a really powerful thing to behold in South Africa, how through the work we’ve done with the Department of Education and others, not just SmartStart, the other organisations that have been working with the Department of Education, how it is all beginning to converge into this powerful, first, very evident political will with statements from the President of South Africa saying things like, “One of the biggest mistakes we made 30 years ago when we moved into a democratic South Africa is not prioritising ECD.” 

And then in the same month, presenting ECD in South Africa with the biggest budget investment we’ve ever had, like just really immediately putting his money where his mouth is. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. That used to be a big uncertainty for us. And now it’s begun to look like something wasn’t.

[Sid]

And when you talk about convergence, when you talk about everything moving into a direction, is it now becoming a movement where you’re able to see shifts happen and where you say you’re able to see that this is something that is foundational for our country’s growth as well?

[Grace]

Without a doubt. When we were imagining building a movement for early childhood development in South Africa, we thought that SmartStart that would be at the centre of it, we would be a force. We are part of it. But, really, it is coming from all directions and it is a movement. We just have to be cautious that we don’t see ourselves speaking on behalf of people, but rather create a movement that everyone can be a part of and can speak on their own behalf.

[Preeti]

Then I think quickly, you should tell everyone here about what is in store for South Africa for the next five years. What is the government and what are you thinking? What is happening?

[Grace]

Yeah. So, we’ve been working on how do we close the gap in access to quality early learning for in particular, the excluded 1.3 million, 3 to 5 year olds? We all accept that we need to be focusing on 0 to 5, but this is that 3 to 5 is a real important opportunity, certainly for an education response to the early years. And in our work with government, that has involved a number of things, including making sure that the current legislation is amended so that it enables that. 

So we currently have someone seconded to government to the Department of Basic Education helping to finalise the amendment. The Children’s Amendment Bill ready for parliamentary debate. It involved opening up opportunities for practitioners to register wherever they are. The biggest opportunity for us there was making sure that the practitioners I was talking about in the poorest communities, can register their programs as they are, and that they will then be supported in partnership with government to improve the infrastructure so that they can be registered and funded by the state. A few other things. 

There have been processes around, a whole drive to professionalise ECD so that it can be, Attractive for new entrants into the job market and, and be a profession that grows in many other parts of the ECD challenge that other people were working on. In the last few months with the the new Government of National Unity, we saw momentum like we have not seen. 

The new minister and the Government of National Unity came on board and she said, ‘I’d like this to be translated into a roadmap to 2030’, which means we want a real path to universal access to quality early learning by 2030. That’s what has been happening. So we had the leadership summit, a few weeks ago, and as I was saying, that was the place where the President declared his you know, misstep in not prioritising ECD. And, the Treasury announced this massive investment in the budget, which is not enough, but it’s a real powerful first step. 

[Sid]

Yeah, it’s a big move. 

[Grace]

That’s right. These are big moves. It’s like really saying we believe in this thing. We have confidence in the leadership that’s in place to put this money into good use for us as a country, to get universal access to quality early learning.

[Preeti] So hopeful. 

[Sid]

I think it’s a perfect way to segue into, well, because we have limited time, to segue into just if I could get reflections from you both on what the way forward is and Preeti from you, on how you can probably now collaborate with Grace a lot more and how we can build and co-travel on this journey with SmartStart and Grace from you on, I mean, of course the conversation was great. I mean, I don’t know whether I could possibly sit and reflect on this. But at the same time, if you could just give us a little bit of, you know, insight into if everything goes well and assuming everything has gone well, and if you could, imagine yourself sitting in 2030 and you’ve achieved everything you need to achieve, what are the key things that you’ve seen happen to say that I know I’ve achieved this? And what does that look like? Yeah.

[Preeti]

I think for us now, at the juncture, like she said, we are at, I feel that we are completely embodying the Societal Thinking model when we speak about, we cannot do this alone. And I think that was evident in our journey and that we need everyone to come together. How do we all co-create and build this ecosystem together, so we all are moving, you know, up and up together? 

I think that and also with similar values that we walked into the room with and to see how you have, was wonderful to see that how everyone else in the working group for the roadmap also holding the same values and the same beliefs. And so we are all on the same page.I think that is wonderful. And the other is that looking now at what do we build together to hold all of us within this, you know, what is that Infrastructure or what are these capabilities that we build. Yeah. So I think I can see that actually as a visual in front of us.

[Grace]

Our journey with C4EC has just been the most amazing thing really, really, totally. And what pleases me deeply is that C4EC will continue to be part of this journey with South Africa now, not just SmartStart. That’s just such a powerful thing, because I think what you bring is, you know, like tangible evidence of what’s possible, like you have, like, real examples of societal shifts that have happened in this, you know, very special way, in ways that, you know, there isn’t – it’s like the convergence of minds and hearts and will, in the direction of the same Goal. 

So I think about, 2030, and I don’t know where I’ll be somewhere. It’s somewhere in that ecosystem, Seeing, a South Africa where that embraces various ways of getting children access to quality early learning, properly recognised by the State with the very powerful evidence of child outcomes, with measurable evidence of contribution to GDP, economic growth brought by Early Childhood Development. 

Because, you know, I think continuing to build the evidence just continues to crystallise and makes what we are doing more and more sustainable. Yes, absolutely. So I see that and I see the possibility of us totally and influencing the way early childhood development is approached and done in the global South, as we learn from other countries like us, growing economies and sharing also our lessons with those countries and yeah, creating major possibilities for future generations. That’s what I see.

[Sid]

When you first encountered this challenge and I think we did speak briefly about it, what were the emotions that it stirred within you? And I’m talking of the time when you specifically saw that shift, what is that, what did that feel like for you? Yeah.

[Grace]

I mean, you know, as you were asking the question immediately, I connected with, anger. There’s a bit of anger like, “How could we allow this kind of thing to happen?” Like, how can It happen for so long? Does that answer your question? It does.

[Sid]

Yeah. That’s perfect. You don’t need to get deeper into that. And, the other question that I wanted to ask you is, which elements of these Problems, if reworked, could serve as a foundation for a better future?

[Grace]

So, we now have evidence. So we know that if we do certain things we would get child outcomes. And we now have evidence of policy, commitment, let’s say sort of political commitment and policy that will follow that. What we need is that movement that, you know, like, shifts us into a unified ecosystem. And, you know, that is not based on everything being the same, like shifting from sense of uniformity to unified. Like you don’t have to be uniform to create unified. 

[Sid]

Unified, not uniform. 

[Grace]

You see, I have this way. They are so alike. 

[Sid]

So the first thing I ever heard when I got to and I kept wondering what it means. Yeah. But over time it means so much and so many different things to different people. And it’s been amazing to see that just shift in me as well.

[Grace]

This was amazing because, you first experience them. And then you remember. But yeah, there’s a phrase for what I’m feeling. Yeah. So it really is the movement building. It’s the movement building, it’s the connection, it’s the diversity of those solutions, it’s the whole societal shift as we merge and narrative again, that will connect us as an ecosystem, etc..

[Sid]

Thank you so much, Grace, for doing this. And it’s been absolutely eye-opening for me. And, I will, now, I think, based on the conversations I’ve had, I’m going to just start working with each domain a little bit just so that I can unpack.

[Grace and Preeti]

Yeah, it’s been fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.