Country: South Africa
Founded: May, 2005

Wordworks is a South African non-profit organisation focused on early language and literacy development in the first eight years of a child’s life. Since 2005, we have worked in under-resourced communities with the adults best positioned to influence young children’s development – parents and caregivers, family and community members, home visitors, early childhood development practitioners, and teachers from Grade R to Grade 3.

https://www.wordworks.org.za/   About Wordworks video

Key Activities

Wordworks advocates for early language and literacy development  during the first nine years of a child’s life at home. at ECD centres and at schoolWe develop multilingual programmes and resources, offer Training of Trainers, and support implementation with partners. Our work builds the capacity of parents, caregivers, ECD practitioners,tutors, afterschool facilitators and teachers. We sustain programmes through training, mentoring, and providing support for monitoring and evaluation. We also share evidence-informed materials through publications, events, and open-access platforms.

Recent Impact

Our STELLAR Programme has been implemented province-wide in Western Cape (reaching 44,220 children through the 300 teachers trained in 2016) as well as Gauteng (reaching over 4,500 teachers and an estimated 88,440 children annually). The Special Needs STELLAR programme in Gauteng reached 11,140 children through 103 trained teachers in 2014. In 2024,  Wordworks provided early literacy programme training and support to 3,141 practitioners, reaching 45,067 children.

Vision for the Future

We have recently finalised our 2024-2030 strategic plan. We have identified three goals for the strategy period:

1. Goal 1 – Improve early language and literacy development through classroom community and home learning programme design, training, and resourcing.
2. Goal 2 – increase awareness, uptake and support of early language and literacy programmes through knowledge sharing advocacy and collaboration.
3. Goal 3 – Grow organisational funding, capacity, accountability and efficiencies.

These goals are supported by key strategic choices of programme alignment, leveraging of programmes, and expansion of programmes, in order to set us up for success in achieving our 2030 strategic goals. We monitor, and report to stakeholders on our business plans annually.

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