The word "Sustainability" is a tricky one

I have been thinking about sustainability for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, to write a Master's thesis about it. 

And I think the reason I keep coming back to it is that sustainability sounds deceptively simple. We usually ask something like: Will the benefits last after the programme ends? That is essentially how the OECD DAC frames it too: do the net benefits continue, or are they likely to continue? The newer definition is actually quite useful because it also asks us to think about the financial, social, environmental and institutional capacities needed to keep those benefits going.

But hang on...What exactly is it that we expect to continue? The programme? The activities? The funding? The people? The materials? The way of working? The result? Those are not the same thing.

The sustainability literature makes this distinction too. Sometimes the intervention itself survives. Sometimes particular activities continue. Sometimes a function becomes institutionalised somewhere else. And sometimes the original programme disappears almost completely, but the benefit continues.

I am increasingly less interested in whether the programme survives, and more interested in whether the change survives. Or perhaps survives is the wrong word as well.

What if sustainability involves changing?

This is where systems thinking became useful to me.

In my Master's research I used Stockmann's idea of extended dynamic sustainability. The basic idea is that an intervention enters an existing system. It interacts with people, organisations, rules, relationships, other programmes and whatever else is happening at the time. Then the system keeps moving. So the outcomes we see ten years later do not necessarily look like the outcomes we saw at endline. They may have changed shape completely.

The opposite assumption is slightly odd when you think about it. We introduce an intervention into a changing education system, leave, come back five or ten years later, and then ask whether the thing is still exactly where we left it. Why would it be?

People move. Policies change. Organisations merge. New programmes arrive. Funding disappears. Somebody adapts a tool because the original version no longer works. Someone who was trained moves into a different job and takes the idea with them. Some of that might actually be evidence of sustainability.

In the education case I studied for my Master's, three mechanisms seemed particularly useful for making sense of this.

One was problem-solving. Did the intervention leave people or institutions better able to solve the problem themselves? Another was multiplication. Did the benefit spread beyond the original people or places? And then modelling: did somebody else take the idea, process or structure and adapt it as a useful model?

That work made me think that some of the strongest forms of sustainability may be almost invisible if we only look for the original intervention. A programme may be gone. But the system may have learned something.

Which brings me to the Anglo American Education programme. 

I was lucky enough to work on the evaluation of this programme, alongside colleagues, over a very long period — from 2019 to 2026. Long enough to see different phases of the programme, different implementation models, different schools and Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, and eventually to go back and ask what had actually lasted.

The programme itself was ambitious. It worked across schools and ECD centres in communities around Anglo American operations, and it tried to strengthen several parts of the education system at once. In the school programme this included teacher development, school leadership, parent engagement, learner support, infrastructure and, later, ICT. In ECD, the support included infrastructure, learning materials, practitioner and centre-manager training and coaching, and support with registration and compliance.

So this was not a neat little intervention where one activity was expected to produce one outcome. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, it was not a programme that forgot about sustainability and suddenly discovered it in the final six months. Quite the opposite.

The programme thought very carefully about stakeholder engagement, ownership and government alignment. Engagement started before implementation and continued throughout the programme. It involved national, provincial, district, community, school and ECD-level actors. There were Local Management Committees. There was provincial project-management capacity. Issues were monitored. The programme deliberately tried to respond to local context rather than simply roll out a fixed package.

In Phase 2, schools were even asked to opt in rather than simply being selected, precisely because the designers thought greater ownership might matter. So yes, this was a pretty thoughtful design. Which makes what happened later much more interesting.

Because then we went back.

Quite a lot was still there

In ECD, the initial results had been strong. The programme combined infrastructure and materials with practitioner training and coaching, support to ECD managers, and help with registration and compliance. And the child outcomes were striking. The proportion of assessed children who were developmentally on track increased from 38% to 65%, moving from below the national comparison benchmark to above it. When we returned later, many centres were still operating. They were still serving children. Many had retained registration, were receiving subsidies and were still using structured learning materials.

In the Whole School Development work, some of the strongest evidence of sustainment was surprisingly ordinary: reading routines, phonics practices, planning approaches and ways of supporting struggling learners were still being used. And I think there is something in that. Maybe things become sustainable when they stop feeling like programme activities and simply become useful ways of doing the work.

But context kept interfering

Some ECD centres were struggling with delayed subsidy payments. Some were navigating registration changes. Some had become overcrowded. Security was a problem. And this is where I think we sometimes use the word context too casually. We write something like: “The intervention was implemented in a challenging context.” Then we move on. But the context is doing quite a lot of work there.

A registered ECD centre with stable management, enough practitioners and reliable subsidy payments is not receiving the same intervention as a centre with an acting manager, overcrowded classrooms and late payments. The input may be identical. The system around it isn't. And that matters for what gets sustained.

So what does this mean for ECD investment now?

I think this is where the systems view becomes practical rather than philosophical. South African ECD now has the benefit of a more clearly negotiated system direction through initiatives such as the Bana Pele Blueprint. That does not mean every funder should suddenly run the same programme. Please no.

Different organisations should still do different things. One may focus on infrastructure. Another on practitioner quality. Another on registration. Another on nutrition or financing or data. But it helps enormously if they are contributing towards a shared system goal. So perhaps an early programme-design question should be:

Where does this intervention fit in the wider ECD system?

And then:

What problem in that system are we helping to solve? Who else is already working on it? Which existing structures could carry this work later? Are we strengthening them, or quietly building a parallel system next door? And if our particular project disappears in five years' time, what capability will remain? 

I no longer think sustainability means freezing an intervention in place. 

I think it may be much more about what the system has learned to do because the intervention was there. Maybe the programme disappears. Maybe the materials change. Maybe somebody else takes over the function. Maybe the original model gets adapted beyond recognition. If the system is now better able to solve the problem, is this not sustainability?  

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash