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The United Nations sustainable development goals recognise the fundamental role of early childhood education in creating a foundation for healthy, sustainable futures. Signatories to the goals committed to, “ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education” by 2030.

It’s a goal we see the importance of first hand at Matjana Preschool. Growing up in a rural area, our kids don’t have much access to libraries, toys, writing and drawing tools and many of the other things that help them develop cognitive and physical skills that will allow them to achieve optimally later in life. We see how much a five year old can learn in just a year at preschool, and hear from the primary school teachers how the education we provide contributes to our student’s achievement at primary school. We expect, and there’s plenty of research evidence to support our intuitions, that attending preschool for two years will have a bigger and better impact on our students’ development.

Although the Sustainable Development Goals are high-level targets, which governments sign onto, we’re committed to making our contribution to achieving the goal for early childhood education in Swaziland, at the community level. That’s why in 2016 we embarked on the ambitious project of building a second classroom so we can enrol four year olds at our preschool.

Building a classroom might not seem like that big a deal, but in the context of our economically marginalised community, in a country where the government does not pay preschool teachers or cover the costs of operating preschools, it’s hugely ambitious. Every year we need to raise all the money we require to pay our teachers, feed our kids, and keep our infrastructure in good order. We’re extremely grateful to the group of international supporters whose financial contributions have enabled us to do this. But we need even more help.

For the past six months we’ve been directing money that would usually go into our operating budget to buying building supplies. We’ve run out of money, and we need to urgently raise some funds to ensure our dedicated staff, three teachers and a security guard, receive their living allowances.

Paying these community members to work at our school is part of our commitment to a second sustainable development goal, promoting “full and productive employment and decent work for all”. Employment opportunities are very scarce in our community, and many adults have to move to town to find jobs. Often the work they find does not constitute what many of us would consider “decent jobs”. So we’re proud of the very small role we’re playing in promoting employment with training opportunities, in our community.

Child care is work that is notoriously under paid and performed in difficult conditions. Most of the care children receive comes from women who work in isolation, receive no pay, get no holidays, and can’t complain to a union if they don’t like their conditions. Yes, we’re talking about mums, and certainly they do it for love. But that should not negate their entitlement to decent work and pay. And we believe that paying women to care for children in community facilities like Matjana Preschool is a great way of promoting the important and skilful work women do, to raise happy, healthy children.

Which brings us to another important sustainable development goal, achieving “gender equality and empowering women and girls”. We believe valuing women’s role as child carers, and ensuring facility-based child care work is paid like all other work, is fundamental to achieving gender equality. We try to make working at Matjana Preschool an empowering experience for our teachers, who are all young women from our community. We know they stand as role models for the young girls they teach.

We need your help to continue with our ambitious project, and doing our part to make sustainable development a reality in Ndabeni community, Kaphunga. We’re asking new and old supporters to dig deep and help us finish our second classroom and pay our teachers and ensure our students keep learning in the best way they know how, through play.