Research 

In Richter, L., et al. (2012). Diagnostic review of early childhood development. Pretoria: Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation & Inter-Departmental Steering Committee on Early Childhood Development 

In order to plan and provision resources for efforts to enhance early child development, it is necessary to have accurate, age-disaggregated data at the provincial and even the district levels. In addition, if early childhood development is to become a national policy priority, then regular collection of meaningful data is needed to be able to reflect the extent to which progress towards policy goals has been made. There are already a large number of widely available nationally representative data sets collected regularly in South Africa that, in their current form, go some way to facilitating these aims, though information more targeted to answering key questions about young children is still desperately needed. In this report, we pull together data from existing data sets to provide a snapshot of the lives of young children in South Africa, and to gauge the need for early child development services and programmes. Specifically, we draw on the General Household Survey (GHS) 2005-2010 (Statistics South Africa, 2005, 2006, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010a), Wave 1 of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) 2008 (The South African Labour and Development Research Unit, 2008), the Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2010 (Statistics South Africa, 2010b), and the 2007 Community Survey (CS) (Statistics South Africa, 2007a). Below, we provide a brief description of each of these data sets. 

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