Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in the South-African early childhood and Grade R spheres. However, South-Africa has a long way to go to meet the needs of majority of its children. Institutional capacity (IC) refers to the administrative and managerial aspects of an Early Childhood Development Centre (ECDC). Failure to build this capacity impacts the quality of services delivered to the most vulnerable children in our society. The purpose of this article is to extract knowledge from the institutional capacity knowledge area, as well as the enterprise engineering body-of-knowledge as a baseline for developing an enterprise capacity development approach (ECDA) for early childhood development centers. The ECDA should be useful to South-African ECD administrators, if they intend to develop enterprise capacity, leading to the improvement in quality of services delivered. ECDA is the main contribution of this article. As a second contribution, we validate its completeness when compared to existing IC literature, as well as its comprehensiveness in terms of eleven approach design principles. Finally, we provide a partial demonstration of ECDA’s heuristic at a real-world ECDC in South Africa.
