How ELMA is investing in universal access to ECD
July 7, 2026
Children from the Ethiopian School Readiness Initiative (ESRI)
The ELMA Foundation’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) focus area aims to support the provision of ECD services for the most vulnerable children. Our investments span across Africa, with special initiatives in three countries: scaling ECD and strengthening the ecosystem in South Africa, scaling quality ECD in Ghana, and strengthening ECD in Ethiopia. Read more about each country’s strategic initiatives below.
Ethiopia
In 2019, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, Adanech Abebe, launched The Future Hope of Addis Ababa (FHA) Early Childhood Development program, which aims to ensure that 1.3 million children under six years old are developmentally on track in health, learning, and psychosocial wellbeing by 2030. In addition to universal access to comprehensive early childhood services, the program focuses on providing intensified support to 330,000 vulnerable families. FHA has six strategic initiatives:
Providing health services by ensuring that all 100 city health centers actively assess developmental milestones at appropriate ages and hire and deploy 5,000 new parental coaches to visit vulnerable homes and coach parents on all aspects of child development with a focus on birth through age three.
Providing social support by providing supplementary foods to low-income families with pregnant women or young children.
Establishing multiple modalities of daycare provision for children from six months through three years old, including launching and managing 240 publicly financed daycares for the poorest families.
Expanding access to quality preschools in all public primary schools for children aged four to six years.
Promoting learning through play in a child-friendly environment by building 12,000 new playgrounds, closing major roads on Sundays, and running periodic play events throughout the city.
At the city’s request, ELMA has largely focused support on the daycare initiative, a brand-new effort for the city that has involved creating new policies and standards, developing a new workforce and training curriculum, and building of supervision and monitoring systems. ELMA currently funds Tiny Totos, Partnership for Change, Ethiopian School Readiness Initiative (ESRI), and The African Center for Early Childhood Development as technical consultants to the city.
Ghana
Since 2017, the ELMA Foundation has been investing in organizations that partner with the government of Ghana to improve kindergarten teacher training, increase access to quality ECD programs, and build the government’s capacity to implement, monitor, and use data. With support from these organizations, the government has created a comprehensive in-service kindergarten teacher training package to strengthen kindergarten teaching practices and improve learning outcomes nationwide. Over the next three years, the government-led training will reach 30,000 teachers and benefit 2.4million students.
In support of this, ELMA’s investment strategy supports organizations to:
Ensure effective implementation of the play-based curriculum by scaling a national training and support package to reach all public kindergarten teachers
Engage families and communities to provide learning opportunities at home to support children’s school readiness
Monitor and supervise accountability at all levels of service delivery
Children playing at an ECD center in Soweto, Johannesburg which is supported by the Unlimited Child
South Africa
Over the last decade, The ELMA Foundation has been investing to strengthen and expand the Early Childhood Development (ECD) ecosystem in South Africa, enabling universal access to ECD.
To do this, ELMA’s strategy has been:
To support the development of government systems required for ECD services to be delivered at scale through the creation of Ilifa Labantwana, a non-profit, systems-focused, ECD technical support organization dedicated to strengthening the financing, data, and workforce systems
To support the building and expanding of platforms needed to provide ECD services at scale:
SmartStart, an early learning social franchise, aims to create a platform that can provide quality early learning to 1 million three and four-year-olds each year
The Unlimited Child, a non-profit, focused on scaling a center-based quality improvement model
Ntataise Trust works to strengthen and systematize a national ECD network of 21 self-sufficient, independent organizations operating in eight of South Africa’s nine provinces
Impande provides a comprehensive package of quality ECD services to a network of ECD centers in southern Kwa-Zulu Natal and northern Eastern Cape
To strengthen core ECD training and support institutions, like TREE-ECD, Khululeka, and the Early Learning Resources Unit, which form the backbone of ECD services and were the building blocks of ECD service provision in South Africa
To effectively co-fund to increase the scale, reach and impact of individual investments, alongside peer funding institutions, such as the DG Murray Trust, the FirstRand Foundation, Yellowwoods Social Investments, This Day Foundation, the Standard Bank Tutuwa Community Foundation, Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Allan and Gill Gray Foundation, DRK Foundation and the Lego Foundation.
