Offering one
ESD spend that comes with a balance sheet.
Establish an Early Rise ECD, aftercare and learner support centre. It is enterprise and supplier development, it is a skills development pipeline, and it is an equity holding in a trading enterprise — in one instrument.
One contribution doing three jobs at once.
Most enterprise development spend buys a report. This buys a lease, a fit-out, eight qualified practitioners in training and a trading centre that families pay every month — mentored from day one by an established private school brand.
The structure is deliberately plain. The funder makes an ESD contribution; Early Rise establishes and operates the centre under the holding company; the funder holds equity in it; and the skills development component can sit inside the contribution or be paid separately, whichever counts for more on your scorecard.
You are not sponsoring a programme. You are opening a business, in a sector with permanent demand, with an operator and a mentor already attached.
- An equity share
- The centre is a real enterprise under the holding company, and the funder holds equity in it. The ESD contribution is impact capital with an owner and a balance sheet, not a grant that closes at year end.
- A location of your choosing
- Funders may nominate the community the centre serves — near an operation, near a workforce, or in a community the group has committed to.
- A supplier development programme for your people
- A centre can carry a dedicated support programme for the children of the funder's own employees, acquired as supplier development — childcare that solves an attendance and retention problem while it earns its place on the scorecard.
- A skills development split that suits your scorecard
- If your SD requirements are already met, the learnership line stays inside the ESD contribution. If they are not, carve it out and pay it as SD — the same eight learners, counted where they are worth most to you.
What it costs to open one centre.
Every line is derived from the business plan assumptions, for a 240 m² centre carrying 80 ECD learners and up to 400 learner support members.
- 24 months of rent, VAT and utilities
- R1 393 920
- Furniture and fit-out
- R150 000
- Mentorship and incubation
- R500 000
- Working capital
- R500 000
- 8 × ECD NQF4 learnerships
- Quoted per intake
- Establishment total, before learnerships
- R2 543 920
240 m² at R180/m² plus VAT, and R35/m² in utilities — R58 080 a month, carried for two years so the centre can grow into its roll instead of chasing it.
Classroom, office and common-area furniture, equipment and the fit-out that makes a leased shell into a licensed centre.
The partner school brand mentoring the centre through its first two years: standards, methodology, practitioner development, and the governance that makes the centre auditable.
Salaries, consumables, marketing and the ordinary cash the centre needs before the roll fills — the reason it can be good before it is full.
The staff pipeline, funded from day one. This line may sit inside the ESD contribution, or be carved out and paid separately as skills development — see below.
The same eight learners, counted where they help you most.
Every Early Rise centre opens with 8 learnerships running. That is not a compliance ornament — a centre cannot be staffed by people it did not train, and the model depends on every member of staff being a qualified ECD practitioner who can stand in front of children.
Because it is genuinely both, the funder chooses where it lands. Fold the learnership cost into the enterprise and supplier development contribution, and the ticket is a single ESD number. Or carve it out, pay it separately as skills development, and reduce the ESD contribution by exactly that amount.
Learnerships also carry their own recognition — B-BBEE points on the skills development element and, subject to your own tax position, the Section 12H learnership allowances. We will not put a percentage on your recovery on a website; we will model it with you against your actual position.
From signature to school gate.
- Months 0–3
Site, lease, licence
Location agreed, lease negotiated, fit-out specified, staff recruited into the learnership pipeline.
- Months 3–12
Open and fill
The ECD programme opens in the morning and learner support in the afternoon. Weekly parent seminars begin. The affiliate programme starts compounding.
- Months 12–24
Trade to capacity
Break-even sits at 18% of capacity — 15 ECD learners and 74 learner support members. Full capacity turns R893 333 a month.
- Year 3 onward
Extend upward
A centre that performs adds the phase above it, then the next, under the brand that mentored it — until it is a school.
Equity share, governance, reporting and exit are agreed at term sheet, against the site and the size of the contribution. We would rather negotiate that with you than publish a number that fits nobody.
Send us a location and a budget envelope.
We will come back with a modelled centre for that site — footprint, staffing, capacity, cash flow, the ESD and SD split, and what the first three years look like — in writing.