title: Yizani Sifunde: An effective approach to closing the early literacy gap
title: Exploring the impact of a collaborative, multi-pronged early literacy intervention on 4- and 5-year-olds, Brief 3
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Von Blottnitz, Magali
Publisher: name: Liberty Community Trust, Wordworks, Book Dash and Nal'ibali
Year: 2024
Subjects: Early learning
Early literacy
Early Childhood Development
Yizani Sifunde
South Africa
Eastern Cape
ECD centres
Liberty Community Trust
Wordworks
Nal'ibali
Book Dash
Khululeka
ITEC
Child assessment
ELOM
Pre-Grade R
Impact Evaluation
Triple-Cocktail approach
Children's Books
Book ownership
Reading
maturation effect
programme effect
Task orientation
Early Learning Outcomes Measure
Social Impact Insights Africa

description: Yizani Sifunde (isiXhosa for “come, let’s read”) aimed to boost early literacy outcomes at under-resourced early childhood development (ECD) centres in the Eastern Cape. It was implemented in three one-year cycles between 2021 and 2023. The project was initiated and funded by the Liberty Community Trust, and jointly designed and delivered by three literacy nonprofits: Book Dash, Nal’ibali and Wordworks. Local Eastern Cape partners ITEC and Khululeka supported implementation. Social Impact Insights Africa delivered the external evaluation. More information on the Yizani Sifunde project can be found on https://bookdash.org/yizani-sifunde/ This Learning Brief was written for the Yizani Sifunde project by Dr Magali von Blottnitz, with input from other project partners. It draws extensively on an external evaluation conducted by Social Impact Insights Africa. Liberty Community Trust holds the intellectual property rights to the evaluation results and gave permission for them to be shared subject to specific acknowledgements.
description: This is the third in a series of learning briefs that explore the design, implementation and impact of Yizani Sifunde, a collaborative multi-pronged intervention designed to boost early literacy outcomes in 4- and 5-year-olds. This brief summarises the quantitative evidence on how the Yizani Sifunde project effectively closed gaps in early learning, with a focus on early language and literacy. Specifically, the brief: * reviews available evidence about the South African early literacy gaps, particularly in rural provinces and among speakers of African languages, and describes the methodology followed by the evaluators * compares the ELOM assessment results achieved by project children at baseline and endline, against the provincial average * isolates the part of the children's learning gains corresponding to programme effect, after correcting for the expected maturation effect * summarises the findings from regression analyses on contributors, mediators and moderators of the learning gains. Key findings are that within 8 months of the intervention, the children have achieved remarkable improvement in their ELOM scores, including in domains that were not targeted by the intervention, such as numeracy. After correcting for maturation, the children on average gained 3 to 6 extra months of learning, and the most vulnerable children gained up to 13 months of learning in addition to the expected 8 months of maturation. Importantly, these positive results hold irrespective of context factors such as class size or presence of other interventions in the ECD centre. An improvement in the children's task orientation appears to have been a key contributor to the learning gains. The number of books received, and owned by the child, was a significant predictor of the endline achievement. These findings confirm the value of the intervention design, including the provision of books to be owned by the children.