Project Hope SA

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Project Hope SA Project Hope is a South African non-profit supporting children to thrive through education, care, and opportunity.

Shop of Hope is one of our initiatives helping to create sustainable income for families.

🧩 Inside a Child’s Inner World: Data with Destiny: Part B💔 Mazi Umntanakho helps us understand Olive’s sad heart.💬 Earli...
15/10/2026

🧩 Inside a Child’s Inner World: Data with Destiny: Part B
💔 Mazi Umntanakho helps us understand Olive’s sad heart.
💬 Earlier this week, I shared our excitement about piloting Mazi Umntanakho, the innovative South African WhatsApp-based emotional assessment tool. It is a conversational chatbot that uses simple pictures and text and is available in 10 languages.
📲 We recently put it to the test with a precious little girl at our Embo ECD centre, and the insights were profound.
🕊️ When Olive joined our programme in January, she was living on the streets, exposed to violence and severely ill. You may remember Olive from our joyful July update, which showed how an adult portion of nutrient-dense ePap helped her gain 1.5kg! After almost a year of our wrap-around care, we were eager to see what the evaluation would reveal about her journey.
The Test Pilot Insights:

🌟 Social-Emotional Baseline: Her Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) showed no significant behavioural concerns across peer relationships or hyperactivity. Encouraging indeed.
💪🏾 Early Learning Foundation: Her baseline cognitive & developmental metrics remain exceptionally strong.
⚡ The Actionable Gap: Olive struggles to recognise & regulate complex feelings like sadness & frustration.
💡 This gave us an actionable roadmap. Through the same WhatsApp platform, we instantly accessed emotional literacy resources, in isiZulu, and shared them directly with her caregiver to use at home.
🛠️ The powerful digital tool gave us the insights we need to ensure she continues to feel safe, confident, and supported. We wish we could have used it when Olive first enrolled in Project Hope, as we are sure we could have made an even greater impact earlier.
⚠️ The Funding Crisis: Mazi Umntanakho's current funding ends in December 2026. Without intervention, this remarkable system will go dormant. It costs roughly US$500 a month to maintain.
🌍 In our South African context, that is a significant amount—but the potential to reach thousands of vulnerable children via an interactive phone app that families and community workers already access is immense.
👁️ Currently, so much attention in ECD is understandably focused on enrolment, centre registration, nutrition, and access. We worry that the emotional development of the child may remain less visible.
👇 Make sure to tune in next Wednesday: What happens when early tracking is non-existent? We share the story of a little girl named Azi, and why we bent our own rules to save her spirit.
💬 What are your thoughts on using mobile tech to track childhood trauma? Let us know in the comments below!

🔗 Partner with our tech vision: If you would like to donate towards keeping this vital resource operational, please contact us. projecthope.org.za/contact/

📱 Seeing the Whole Child: Data with Destiny: Part A❓ “Sara, why are you heading back to university? And, ‘WhatsApp’ with...
12/10/2026

📱 Seeing the Whole Child: Data with Destiny: Part A
❓ “Sara, why are you heading back to university? And, ‘WhatsApp’ with the digital leap?”

🤸 For those who don’t know me, I am Sara. My entire professional career has been driven by one mission: the well-being of children. I started out in the medical space, transitioned into Early Childhood Development (ECD) twelve years ago, and founded Project Hope in 2020.

🛤️ Over this journey, I have learnt that true development extends beyond a standard classroom. A child needs food, healthcare, play, safety, supportive relationships, and easy access to core social services. These basic requirements are deeply interconnected, yet the systems providing them on the ground are often fragmented.

💝 This disconnect is why we developed our comprehensive wrap-around programme. We look at the whole child across physical, educational, and social domains to identify critical gaps. But one key area has remained notoriously difficult to track: measuring and understanding how a child is doing emotionally.

🧠 That challenge led me to Professor Catherine Draper and Mazi Umntanakho (meaning "Know Your Child"). This is an innovative South African WhatsApp-based tool that unlocks vital information to help us understand a child's inner world more fully.

📲 October Pilot Project: This month, we are excited to pilot Mazi Umntanakho with a small group of children at our Embo ECD centre. This testing phase will lay the foundation for a systematic rollout across all our centres in 2027.

❤️ The Hope & Heart System: In line with this digital leap, we have built our own custom data-capturing tech, The Hope & Heart System; no more messy paper trails and rigid Excel sheets. Now, every child in our network receives a unique ID, allowing us to track their growth over time across multiple domains.

🎒 Along with upgrading our tools, I felt it was time to upskill my own knowledge base. This intersection brings together many years of work: our wrap-around model, play-based training, The Hope & Heart System, and now, my PhD studies.

🎓My doctoral research focuses specifically on children who are not enrolled in formal early learning programmes. Children outside the preschool system are completely invisible to policymakers. If we cannot see them or understand their circumstances, how can we connect them to the right support?

📝 The ultimate aim:
• See the whole child
• Understand the child’s needs
• Connect the child to the right support
• And then ask, ‘Is it making a difference?’

📝 We do not want to simply hope or believe that our work is making a difference. We want to measure it, track it, keep learning, and refine our approach to increase our impact. Because every single child deserves to be seen, and once we see them, we have a collective responsibility to help them thrive.

👇 Come back on Thursday for Part B, where I will share our experience of the Mazi WhatsApp tool and the insight it gave us into one child’s inner world.
🔗 Partner with our vision: projecthope.org.za/contact/

🗣️ Play is the Pathway Children Use to Find their Voice: Part B🌈 When a quiet child, like Bongi, shares her inner wo...
09/10/2026

🗣️ Play is the Pathway Children Use to Find their Voice: Part B
🌈 When a quiet child, like Bongi, shares her inner world, it is magical!
💬 “She is talking more now. She is not just watching us anymore. She wants to join in.” Her teacher shared this beautiful update with us.
👀 At first, little Bongi was far more comfortable watching from the sidelines. Purposeful play gave her a safe, gentle way into the community:
• Joining a group song alongside her peers.
• Copying a classmate's movements.
• Choosing toy blocks to build with.
• Using more of her own words slowly, without the pressure of a rigid lesson.
🥰 One of the sweetest changes has been hearing Bongi sing along during play activities. At first, her voice was barely a whisper; now, she is proudly joining the other children. These are vital milestones in Early Literacy & Language. Every song she joins builds the core foundations for communication and future learning.
🌱 Her language is not emerging from stressful drills; it is blossoming through something she loves: play.
🧸 Help Us Build the Project Hope Toy Library
This month, we want to put this powerful learning into practice. We are building a dedicated Toy Library for our Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, filled with high-quality, purposeful toys that encourage our children to build, imagine, create, and play together.
👇 There are two ways you can champion our preschoolers today:
1️⃣ Purchase a Toy: We highly recommend the affordable selection of wonderful wooden toys available from our friends at Tree ECD Toy Shop (tree-ecd.co.za). Options range from just R40 to R250—including wooden cars, puzzles, stackers, and colour pegs.
2️⃣ Make a Targeted Donation: Prefer to donate directly? Please use the reference “TOYS” when donating to fund durable play resources.
💡 This is not about just having more toys. It is about giving children like Bongi more opportunities to explore, communicate, and learn.
🔗 Build the Toy Library with us: projecthope.org.za/contact/
👉 Tune in next Monday morning, where we reveal how a simple smartphone app is unlocking the emotional worlds of our preschoolers.

🌍 A quiet child waits patiently to share her inner world: Part A🧒 Bongi was a very shy little girl when she first joined...
06/10/2026

🌍 A quiet child waits patiently to share her inner world: Part A
🧒 Bongi was a very shy little girl when she first joined our ECD programme. It was her first experience of a structured learning environment and everything felt a little overwhelming.
👣 From the background, Bongi would watch. She spent her days carefully tracking her peers, quietly observing before deciding whether it was okay to step forward. She needed deep patience, constant reassurance from her teachers, and most importantly, an absolute sense of safety.
🏔️ Last term, her teachers described her as gentle but hesitant. She wanted to learn, but she lacked the confidence to participate. Even the simple act of joining a playground game felt like a mountain she couldn't climb.
✨ But in the classroom, something beautiful is shifting. Bongi is beginning to feel brave—and the vehicle for that journey is play.
🧩 Play gives a guarded child a gentle pathway into community without the intense pressure of having to get everything right. Bongi can watch, copy, explore, laugh, and sing in her own time. Every game she joins, she is practising far more than play. She is gaining Early Literacy & Language Skills.
📊 This is a primary milestone we track using the Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM). Through purposeful play, Bongi is building foundational skills by:
• Listening intentionally to the children around her.
• Absorbing new vocabulary.
• Navigating social boundaries like taking turns and responding to peers.
• Finding her unique voice to make herself understood.
🪜 Progress in vulnerable communities does not always arrive in one dramatic moment. Sometimes, it looks like a shy child choosing to step off the sidelines. Sometimes, it is simply looking up, smiling, and saying, “I want to play.”
🌱 When a child begins to feel safe, they can begin to feel brave. And when they feel brave, their voice has room to grow.
👇 Come back this Friday for Part B and a heartwarming update from Bongi's teacher.
🔗 Support our classrooms: projecthope.org.za/contact/

03/10/2026

Can you help?

We are in search of a new place to call our Project Hope office.

Ideally Hillcrest, Botha’s Hill or KwaNyuswa (KZN)

We need our new office to be accessible to ECD teachers, families of our children and the public. A place to drop off donations, base our admin, and to use as a central point from which to move supplies (food, books etc).

If you have any ideas or know of a suitable spot, please pop us a message.

We need a spot by 31 Dec at the latest.

A new chapter, a new journey, and new plans… watch this spot!

Super excited!

🧩 Children at Play Thrive: Part B🧒 From her window, Kosi watched the line of children enter the Embo schoolyard, her ear...
02/10/2026

🧩 Children at Play Thrive: Part B
🧒 From her window, Kosi watched the line of children enter the Embo schoolyard, her ears straining to catch the laughter she longed to be a part of.
👣 The first step in learning is simply feeling that you belong. Before joining Project Hope, little Kosi had lost her father, and her mother worked tirelessly washing clothes in the community to put food on the table. Sadly, preschool fees were a luxury they couldn't afford.
💝 With Project Hope, Kosi finally got her chance. But walking through the preschool gates was only the beginning—play became her true game changer. For a little girl who had spent much of her early childhood isolated at home, being surrounded by other children opened up a whole new universe.
📈 Through playing, singing, and exploring in the classroom, Kosi found her place. To track her growth, we use the Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM). A key area we assess is Social-Emotional Functioning—a child’s ability to manage emotions, adapt to new situations, and build relationships.
📊 The 2024 Thrive by Five Index revealed that emotional functioning is a powerful predictor of early learning outcomes, carrying an effect nearly as large as socioeconomic status!
🎯 For Kosi, play expands her world:
• A game with a friend gives her a reason to communicate.
• Singing gives her a chance to express herself and gain confidence.
• Laughing with a classmate or discovering a new skill builds the emotional foundation she needs to thrive.
• Purposeful play is shaping her heart and her future.
🤝 This is why extending our play-based curriculum matters so deeply. By partnering with a global early childhood development organisation, we can train our educators to weave this purposeful play into the school day. This curriculum addition costs just R500 ($30) per child and brings this life-changing expertise directly to their classrooms.
🙌 Will you help us bring the power of purposeful play to life? Contact Sara and give children like Kosi the ultimate foundation to learn, connect, and believe in themselves.
👇 Come back next Tuesday for the tale of the shy child whose bravery blossomed through play.
🔗 Partner with us: projecthope.org.za/contact/

🪙 Play-Based Learning is Certified Gold: Part A💬 “She doesn’t want to learn; she just wants to play!”❓ Sound familiar? I...
01/10/2026

🪙 Play-Based Learning is Certified Gold: Part A
💬 “She doesn’t want to learn; she just wants to play!”
❓ Sound familiar? It’s a complaint we frequently hear from parents and teachers.
🎯 This month, Project Hope reframes this misconception. Because for young minds, play is not what happens after learning—play is how children learn about themselves, others, and the world.
🌈 Play is magical. It ignites curiosity and unlocks a dopamine reward that makes preschool fun. Toddlers can’t learn if they’re miserable.
🧩 In a play-based classroom, children aren't simply told what to think. They are guided to explore, create, and solve problems through hands-on discovery. Simple play is developmental gold:
• Building a tower lays early maths foundations.
• Pretending to run a shop builds essential language and social skills.
• Drawing and threading beads strengthens fine-motor coordination.
• Playing together teaches children to communicate, cooperate, and manage emotions.
👩‍🏫 Let’s get serious about play! Zinhle, one of our Area Programme Leaders, recently completed a certified Power of Play course. Increasing her understanding of the importance of play is crucial. Zinhle oversees our sponsored children in the Embo Reserve Area and works closely within the ECD community. The knowledge she gains has an extended reach and gives her new tools to help local teachers use everyday play more intentionally.
🤝 Now, we want to take this further. We are exploring a partnership with an international organisation with 28 years of global experience in early childhood development (ECD). Currently, our wrap-around model provides food, healthcare, and education support to 57 vulnerable children in our sponsorship programme. We also focus on uplifting Project Hope’s affiliated ECD centres. This holistic approach impacts the lives of 140+ children across KZN’s KwaNyuswa and Embo Reserve Areas.
🎨 Although we already respond to many factors that shape a child’s development, there is a significant gap we have struggled to address: social-emotional resilience. By bringing play expertise into our classrooms, we can train ECD practitioners to weave safety, connection, and emotional regulation into daily routines.
💰An overarching way of working with children, this play-based system is a once-off cost of just R500 ($30) per child—a life-changing investment in self-belief and improved learning outcomes. Happy minds soak up new skills.
💛 Want to fund a child’s access to this system designed for underprivileged communities? Contact Sara to donate today.
👇 Come back tomorrow for Part B, where we share how play completely transformed one little girl's world.
🔗 Support our teachers: projecthope.org.za/contact/

🔑 Part Two: Handcrafted with Love—Meet CebisileIn the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal, where the green landscape stretche...
25/09/2026

🔑 Part Two: Handcrafted with Love—Meet Cebisile
In the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal, where the green landscape stretches out beneath a wide African sky, you will find extraordinary women who carry immense responsibility in their hands.
❤️ And sometimes, those hands create something beautiful.
👦 Meet Cebisile, the dedicated mother of our wonderful Slindokuhle—or Sli, as we affectionately know him. If you have followed Sli’s journey with Project Hope, you already know he is a joyful little boy with a massive personality and an even bigger heart. He is a natural leader who constantly looks out for his friends to make sure everyone is okay.
💡 Behind this remarkable boy stands a hardworking mother who does everything within her power to build a better future for her family. Cebisile works at the local school, manages her household daily, and is even finding the courage to continue her own adult education.
🎨 In between it all, Cebisile creates. With incredible focus, her hands craft our gorgeous Beaded Keyrings:
• Authentic local artistry: Each piece is assembled slowly and carefully, bead by bead, by a mother sitting in the heart of the Valley of 1000 Hills.
• A piece of her story: These aren't mass-produced items from a distant factory. They carry the perseverance, skill, and deep love of a local mama juggling work, parenthood and household chores.
• Retail Price: R60,00—making it the perfect accessory for your daily keys or laptop bag zipper.
🛒 Beyond Charity—Walking Alongside: When you purchase one of Cebisile's keyrings through the Shop of Hope, you aren't simply giving back. Your purchase says: "I see your effort, and I am walking alongside you."
✨ At Project Hope, we believe in celebrating community gifts and creating sustainable opportunities so mothers can earn an independent income from their talents. Beautiful things can grow, even in the most difficult circumstances.
👇 Head over to our online store to pick up your handcrafted keyring today and carry a piece of the Valley’s hope wherever you go!
🔗 Shop the Collection Online: shopofhope.co.za/product/beaded-keyring/

☕ Part One: Seeing Possibility in the OrdinaryBefore we can help a family, we must first hear their story and celebrate ...
23/09/2026

☕ Part One: Seeing Possibility in the Ordinary
Before we can help a family, we must first hear their story and celebrate their unique gifts.
🏡 Behind one of the handmade treasures you will find in our Shop of Hope is a very special woman—meet Gogo Gabisile. She is the grandmother of precious Qhawekazi. Gogo Gabisile spends her days loving and protecting her granddaughter. When her hands are not busy caring for Qhawe, they are creating unique home crafts.
💡 When a generous community member from Hillcrest donated a collection of enamel mugs to Project Hope, we looked at them and asked: “What shall we do with these?” Gogo Gabisile had a plan. In isiZulu, the name Gabisile loosely translates to "having been given a gift"—and she certainly has a gift for transforming the ordinary into art.
🎨 Her flagship creation is the gorgeous African Beaded Mug, a stunning design that elevates your tea or coffee break:
• Vibrant African Craftsmanship: Each mug features an intricate South African Flag Design, hand-beaded with incredible patience, creativity, and attention to detail.
• Authentic Enamel Framework: Built onto a classic, durable enamel mug, making it a unique statement piece for your office, kitchen or camping trips.
• Retail Price: R250,00—with every cent directly creating opportunities for local caregivers to earn an independent income.
🛒 Shop with a Purpose: Today, her mugs are proudly sold through the Shop of Hope. Our online Social Enterprise Outlet allows you to purchase something beautiful while investing in a grandmother's ability to sustain her household. True empowerment isn't about charity; it's about creating opportunities for someone to share their skills and earn an income from something they love.
✨ Every item purchased says something powerful:
• We celebrate your incredible talent and creativity.
• We see your deep devotion to your family.
• We believe local skills deserve to be recognised and rewarded.
👇 On Friday, we introduce you to another extraordinary artisan, Cebisile, and reveal the heartbeat behind the beautiful handcrafted keyrings in our shop! Just in time for payday: nudge, nudge, wink, wink. 😉
🔗 Shop the Look Online: shopofhope.co.za/product/african-beaded-mug/

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Hillcrest

Opening Hours

Monday 07:30 - 12:30
Wednesday 07:30 - 12:30
Friday 07:30 - 12:30

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