What Happens Between the Promise and the Child

In March 2025, shortly after I joined the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Early Childhood Development Registration Support Programme, I learned that the initiative had reached more than 70,000 children. I still remember the weight of that number. Seventy thousand children. It was an impossible number to hold in my head. When I tried to picture them all at once, my mind hit a wall.

So instead, I pictured one. I imagined a three-year-old girl arriving at an early childhood development centre on a cold autumn morning, holding onto her mother's coat, still learning how to say goodbye without tears. I pictured the routine waiting for her: a warm bowl of porridge, a morning song, an afternoon nap on a small mattress and the messy joy of learning how to grip a crayon.

She would never know that somewhere else, in a room where most of the work happens in silence, people were working through registration files, checking information, following up on missing documents, correcting errors and clearing the administrative steps between her ECD centre and formal recognition. She would never know our names. And that is precisely how it should be.

Today, that number has surpassed 200,000 children. Strangely, when I look at that number now, I don't think first about its size. I think about paperwork.

The programme I work on supports the Gauteng Department of Education in the processes that enable ECD services to become formally registered: assessing applications, verifying information, following up on outstanding documentation, supporting practitioner vetting and helping files move through the registration process. Formal registration brings an ECD service into a different relationship with the state, creating pathways to oversight, support and, where the requirements are met, public funding. In practice, that can mean eligibility for government per-child subsidies, access to formal oversight and support, and the ability to operate within a regulatory framework designed to protect the children it serves. Without functioning administrative systems to make that process work, an ECD centre can spend years caring for children while remaining outside the formal system and unable to access support that could make a material difference to the children in its care.

That is the invisible infrastructure behind the number.

The invisible infrastructure of justice

Those pathways matter because what sits on the other side of a functioning system can be profoundly practical: access to support, stronger oversight, safer services and, where the requirements are met, public funding that can help an ECD programme serve its children better.

It is where an ideal begins to acquire material form.

We often speak about inequality as though it exists only in the distribution of money. But there is another inequality, and it is quieter. It is the inequality of access to functioning systems.

A right may exist. Funding may exist. A policy may be progressive and well-intentioned. But if the person for whom it was designed cannot successfully navigate the system that sits between them and that opportunity, we have to ask how material that right really is.

This is why administrative capacity should not be dismissed as bureaucracy. Done badly, it becomes a barrier. Done well, it is infrastructure, the bridge between intention and implementation. The bridge between a document and a life.

Working so closely with the Gauteng Department of Education has taught me something I will carry long after this programme ends: systems do not strengthen themselves. People strengthen them. Skilled, disciplined, committed people who can recognise when something is wrong, understand why, and stay with the problem until it is resolved.

We should never underestimate that kind of capacity. And we should never fail to resource it.

We have never lacked ideals

South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of beautiful commitments to children. Our laws and policies recognise that childhood matters. We understand, at least on paper, that the earliest years of a child's life profoundly shape everything that follows. We speak about access, protection, nutrition, development and dignity with fluency and feeling.

The harder question is what happens between the promise and the child.

Nelson Mandela understood something about this. He spoke about the need to change the material conditions of people's lives. I have found myself returning to that word: material. Because justice cannot live only in what we write down or aspire to. It has to become something people can actually access and experience.

Between an ideal and a life, there is a gap. And in that gap lives all the work that nobody photographs: the file opened, the discrepancy noticed, the phone call made, the record corrected, the data cleaned and checked and submitted to a system that will eventually, if everything is right, issue a certificate that a practitioner will put on a wall.

The certificate itself is not the point. What formal recognition can make possible is.

What legacy actually requires

Mandela's words are everywhere in South Africa. On walls, in speeches, in the opening lines of reports that go on to describe the same persistent failures his words were meant to prevent.

Working on this programme has changed how I think about that. Legacy cannot only be what we remember. It must also be what we make possible.

And making things possible is rarely dramatic. It is rarely what gets photographed. It looks like this:

A person at a desk.
A file opened.
A discrepancy noticed.
A phone call made.
A practitioner vetted.
A record corrected.
A certificate issued.
A service recognised.
A child reached.

Then another. And another. And another.

Until somebody runs the numbers and tells you there are more than 200,000.

I still cannot picture 200,000 children at once. Perhaps I am not supposed to. Perhaps a number like that was never meant to be held all at once. Maybe the point is that it was built the only way justice ever really gets built: one decision, one file, one child at a time.

There is a three-year-old girl somewhere in Gauteng. She arrived at her ECD centre this morning holding onto her mother's coat. She does not know our names.

And that is exactly how it should be.