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South Africa's basic education system is dysfunctional. It scores last or close to last in a myriad of metrics and delivers learners with some of the worst literacy and numeracy competencies worldwide. A bimodal distribution in the results exists when learners from the richest socioeconomic quintile are performing adequately well, while learners from the poorest quintiles are failing. This paper presents a system dynamics simulation model to describe the causal linkages between improved early childhood and pre-school learning practices on the education system as a whole. The paper investigates the difference in performance between rich and poor communities. Three interventions explore the research question of whether it is the number of enrolments into early childhood development programs that increases a cohort's school readiness, or rather the quality of the early childhood development programs into which they were enrolled. The results answer the research question for the Western Cape province by showing that increasing the quality of the formal ECD programs leads to a greater percentage of school-ready five year olds than increasing the percentage of enrolled children, but that decreasing community poverty leads to better results than either intervention. The results show the simulation model to be a powerful tool to assist with policy setting and intervention testing for any other province or country by simply changing the input data and calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's basic education system is dysfunctional. It scores last or close to last in a myriad of metrics and delivers learners with some of the worst literacy and numeracy competencies worldwide. A bimodal distribution in the results exists when learners from the richest socioeconomic quintile are performing adequately well, while learners from the poorest quintiles are failing. This paper presents a system dynamics simulation model to describe the causal linkages between improved early childhood and pre-school learning practices on the education system as a whole. The paper investigates the difference in performance between rich and poor communities. Three interventions explore the research question of whether it is the number of enrolments into early childhood development programs that increases a cohort's school readiness, or rather the quality of the early childhood development programs into which they were enrolled. The results answer the research question for the Western Cape province by showing that increasing the quality of the formal ECD programs leads to a greater percentage of school-ready five year olds than increasing the percentage of enrolled children, but that decreasing community poverty leads to better results than either intervention. The results show the simulation model to be a powerful tool to assist with policy setting and intervention testing for any other province or country by simply changing the input data and calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic created large disruptions in the energy industry as governments all around the world responded by enforcing lockdowns on 54% of the global population to slow down the spread of the virus. This impacts the energy consumption of the residential sector as policies prevented residents from leaving their homes and accelerated the transition towards remote work environments. The impact of lockdown on South Africa's energy sector is unique to other countries due to its extreme inequalities across the affluence divide and ongoing blackouts that affect the entire country. A case study is performed in George, a region in South Africa with a distribution of wealth and energy inequality typical for South Africa. In this paper, the following questions are answered: (i) How has the lockdown period influenced the total energy consumption of a household? and (ii) To what extent has the lockdown affected energy consumption of households based on wealth and demographics? The results of this study showed that implementing the highest stage of lockdown resulted in wealthy communities increasing their overall energy consumption by 5 percentage points and poor communities by 2.5 percentage points. The findings of this study support the use of local data and insight for the unique difference in behavioural change across different communities for optimal decision making in future pandemics or natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]