Nanga believes that South Africa’s most vulnerable communities will thrive only when their most vulnerable children thrive. At Nanga, we identify children whose well-being has been jeopardized by social ills, disease, and extreme poverty and put them on a sustainable path to success. Here’s how we do it:
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Drawing on educational theory and the experiences of the world’s most successful poverty relief programmes, Nanga places early childhood development at the center. Children cannot succeed later in life unless they receive crucial inputs in their earliest years: language exposure, well-designed cognitive education, and stimulating human interaction. At Nanga’s Early Development Centre, children receive all of this and more from a staff of certified instructors. But what sets Nanga apart from many other early development programmes is that we understand how to extract the largest possible long-term benefit from early development education: our Early Development Centre puts children on the right path, but Nanga provides a set of crucial surrounding programmes to ensure that they stay there as they grow older: Nanga School Support, the Nanga Health and Nutrition, and the Nanga Community Network. That’s the Nanga Advantage: when high-quality early development curriculum meets well-designed accompanying programmes, every child and every community can succeed.
The Development Centre at Nanga
Why Do We Prioritize Early Childhood Development?
Worldwide, there is growing consensus that funding high-quality early childhood development programmes is an essential tool for economic growth and the smartest investment we can make in struggling communities. The quality of children’s first few years of life determines their lifelong potential for intellectual growth and achievement, so giving children the right tools early on pays off enormously not only for individual children but for the entire community. A wide range of academic studies shows that individuals who receive high-quality early childhood education are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to find a high-paying job, and less likely to commit crimes. When it comes to choosing ways to uplift our poorest communities, we can’t make a better choice than early childhood development.
What Makes Our Centre First-Rate?
The Early Development Centre at Nanga uses the best practices in early development education to achieve outstanding results for each attendee. Here’s how:
The Nanga Advantage
The Nanga Advantage is the set of extra steps that we take to ensure that children derive the largest possible long-term benefit from attending our Development Centre. Unlike many comparable programmes, Nanga recognizes that children cannot fully benefit from early development education if they face major obstacles in other areas and chapters of their lives. Early childhood development curriculum is wasted on a child who does not receive a proper education in primary school, does not have medical care or nutritious food to eat, or does not live in a safe home or community. Nanga has developed three accompanying initiatives to ensure that none of these obstacles prevent children from reaching their fullest potential: Nanga School Support helps children thrive in school, the Nanga Health and Nutrition initiative keeps children healthy and gives them the nourishing food they need to grow, and the Nanga Community Network stabilizes children’s homes and the community at large.