Social Enterprise
Before the term social enterprise was coined, Children's Campaign Trust, with a track record of 19 years now, has pioneered in this market segment.
A social enterprise is defined as:
"A business with a social end rather than a purely capitalistic, profit-driven motive."
What makes CCT a social enterprise is that the beneficiaries of the trust are the children of Cape Town. Over the years, the trust has made two major investments that have, and continue to, change the lives of thousands of children in the townships of Cape Town.
The first, Connect Network was started in 2004 and which networks with organisations predominantly aimed at women and children at risk in the Greater Cape Town area. Over a period of ten years CCT has contributed close to R3 million of funding to the network.
Connect Network currently networks with 110 NGO's that have a combined reach of 250 000 children and 43000 women in a year. The main focus is to work with the leadership of these projects to help them sustainably deliver better services to women and children at risk.
The combined budgets of these 115 projects is over R140 million per annum.
The second, is Quality Life Montessori education for the townships of Cape Town. in 2008, a programme of delivery of Montessori education for the early childhood development centres of Cape Town was systematically developed. over the last eight years all the building blocks to deliver this strategy were put into place. There are eleven independent strategies that were developed to ensure the delivery of quality Montessori to township schools. These strategies included having to start our own training organisation to train teachers. it included our own food company to produce food for the schools. it includes strategies for security, building and equipping our campuses. It includes a healthcare program. It includes parent education. It includes an accounting company to administer the schools and a maintenance team to keep the schools in good order. No issue has been left unresolved.
The QLM plan is to provide quality education for 70 000 children, who are currently in no form of ECD programme whatsoever. Less than one third of Cape Town's children under 6 years of age are in a formal ECD environment. Our goal is to increase this capacity by 70 000 over the next 15 years.