FUTURE INVESTMENT: Thrive by Five uses data to drive smarter investment in early childhood

From an early age, DataDrive2030 founder and executive director Sonja Giese knew that her future would involve working in the child development sector. Her awareness of both the vulnerability of children and the social injustices shaping South African society was the driving force behind a more-than-30-year career marked by milestones in research and problem solving.

One of these milestones was the release of a game-changing report on the early childhood development (ECD) sector, the Thrive by Five Index, in 2022. The index was initiated by Innovation Edge – an impact-first investor founded by Giese to target early childhood challenges – in collaboration with other organisations. It was the largest survey of preschool child outcomes ever attempted in South Africa.

Reflecting on the impact of the index, Giese said: “It’s been much more profound than I even anticipated, and I think it’s because it’s a true partnership. After the first launch of the index… one of the things I was anxious about was that the sector would feel criticised... but actually what they felt was heard and seen. They felt validated. They felt like their work was important.”

Democratised data

The national survey behind the index, conducted every three years, measures the proportion of children aged 50 to 59 months across all nine provinces who are developmentally on track for their age in key areas of development. The 2024 survey was led by the Department of Basic Education and coordinated by DataDrive2030.

The index has become an important reference point for people across the government, business and civil society tracking progress in ECD.

“We wanted the Thrive by Five Index to be the national narrative, and we’ve got a lot more work to do. But I really think... it’s given this common thing that we all can see and work toward... It’s not about any one particular organisation’s interventions. It’s about how collectively, as a country, we can shift the needle,” said Giese.

Conducting a survey on the scale of the Thrive by Five Index is no easy feat. Hundreds of field workers visited communities across the country, navigating local challenges and convincing parents and principals to provide them with their time.

“We interviewed parents, principals and practitioners. We assessed children, we did observations of their programmes... We needed to be able to link every single one of those data points to every single child, to every early learning programme, in order to look at the relationships between things,” said Giese.

“In identifying the non-enrolled children, we had to knock on over 20,000 doors, going door to door, and that was huge.”

One of Giese’s priorities is that the survey outcomes are packaged in a way that “democratises” the data, allowing it to be placed in the hands of all those who drive change, from academics to ECD practitioners.

She noted that having data points for young children had allowed organisations to motivate for greater investment in the early years.

“If your first data point is matric, then people are investing just before matric. But if your data point is at the age of four, people can say, ‘Okay, if I put money into this... I should see a change immediately,’ and I think that’s been powerful.”

Learning from experience

Across every stage of her career, Giese has drawn lessons about the value of data from her work. During her time as the HIV/Aids coordinator at the University of Cape Town’s Children’s Institute in the early 2000s, she learned the power of “telling a story”, not only through quantitative data, but also qualitative research.

“If people are invisible – if any group is invisible – then they get ignored. And the way to make them visible is through is through telling their story,” she said.

Later, while holding a leadership postition at the early childhood NGO Ilifa Labantwana, Giese gained a deep understanding of how government systems around ECD functioned, allowing her to pursue the development of tools that could enhance this work.

“Whatever work we do, it’s not going to land unless we make sure that it’s integrated well into a system,” she said.

In 2014, Giese founded Innovation Edge. She led the organisation for eight years before founding DataDrive2030 in 2022.

The “core business” of DataDrive2030 is the early learning outcomes measurement (Elom) tools it provides to measure a range of developmental outcomes in young children, and provide an indication of the quality of the early learning environment in home and programme settings.

The tools, designed to be accessible and affordable in a South African context, allow organisations and ECD centres to collect data, track progress and make better decisions.

“It’s very affordable, and if organisations can’t afford it, we raise the funds to do it for free,” said Giese.

Over the course of her career, Giese has observed radical changes in how ECD is perceived. While it was formerly seen as a non-essential source of childcare for parents, it is now better understood to be a vital part of the early education and support to which every child has a right.

Looking ahead, she emphasised the need to close the last 30% access gap to early learning programmes.

“If you look at data over the last decade, apart from a few blips around [the time of the Covid-19 pandemic], there’s been a pretty steady level of access... If you look at four year olds, it’s always hovered at around 70% accessing... and I think we need to really think about that. For the next round of Thrive by Five, we’re going to be doing a lot of deep work to really try to understand the supply-demand issue,” said Giese. DM