Building the workforce for an early childhood home-visiting programme: Reflections from the field

Abstract

This article explores the experiences of a group of community members working at a local nongovernmental organisation who attended and participated in an early childhood development (ECD) home-visiting training workshop. The participants were
purposively selected as they were already working as community health workers and life-skills coordinators in two communities of
the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The communities are informal settlements characterised by extreme poverty, rendering many
young children in the communities vulnerable to risk factors and poor future outcomes. A qualitative approach, grounded in an
interpretivist paradigm and an intervention research design, was adopted to evaluate the implementation of an early childhood
home-visiting programme for vulnerable children aged 0–2 years. This article presents the findings on the second research
objective of the broader study: to explore the effectiveness of a transdisciplinary early childhood home-visiting training programme.
A multidisciplinary team comprising professionals from across education, health, and social work conducted the training. Data
were generated using focus group discussions and analysed using thematic analysis. Two key themes emerged. The first was the
benefits of a transdisciplinary training programme, and the second were the gaps in it. The findings indicate that participants had gained transdisciplinary knowledge and that further training was needed to fill some gaps identified by the study. The article shows that an early childhood home-visiting programme could be offered through a home-visiting workforce comprising trusted community members who receive ongoing support from a multidisciplinary team. This would meet South Africa’s need to build a local, community-based ECD workforce in a sustainable and empowering manner to support vulnerable children during the first 1,000 days.