The Equality Collective
Tess Peacock founded the Equality Collective in 2020 with seed funding received during her time as an AFRE Fellow.
The Equality Collective is an activist, community-embedded social justice organisation based in Mbhashe Local Municipality in the rural Eastern Cape’s Amathole District Municipality (ADM). Its vision is to have thriving communities collectively participating in a just and caring society, and its mission is to be innovative in the advancement of access to justice, build the capacity and infrastructure for collective participation and action, and share research and learning. This, in turn, informs the strategic focus of its work on achieving improved access to socio-economic rights, enhanced responsive governance and accountability, and a strong, more active citizenry. Further, their innovative way of working, defined by co-creation, cooperation, and constructive advocacy, enables them to maximise civic pressure for systemic change. Currently, they have three streams of work: Access to Justice, Right to Water, and Right to Early Childhood Development.
Tess is acutely conscious of being a White South African as the founder. Her dedication transcends her role as the Director, aspiring to establish a legitimate, deeply rooted organisation firmly grounded in its core values, steadfastly committed to transformative and systemic change.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
The Equality Collective was founded due to the scarcity of organizations reaching South Africa's remote rural areas. We are located in the Wild Coast region, historically designated as a "Black Homeland" during apartheid.
This area remains one of the country's poorest due to its challenging terrain with poor roads, steep hills, and deep river gorges, resulting in long travel distances. Access to essential services like electricity, safe water, sanitation, healthcare, and communications is limited, and local governments face significant dysfunction.
Despite these challenges, the region possesses a strong sense of community, rich history, fertile land, and a desire for improvement. This unique blend of difficulties and strengths makes the Xhora Mouth Administrative Area an ideal place for the Equality Collective's work to flourish.
Impact
The organisation’s major achievements to date include:
Access to Justice
As a community-embedded law organisation, the Equality Collective aims to serve the direct needs of
community members. To date they have assisted over 300 walk-in clients and outreach clients with their paralegal clinic.
Amanzi Kumntu Wonke – Water for all
The Amanzi Kumntu Wonke project has aimed to ensure strong community pressure for greater accountability and improved water services by their district municipality, Amathole District Municipality (ADM). And, in a relatively brief period, the project has had notable outcomes and impact—a testament both to the commitment of the stakeholders involved and to the model of collective community-based advocacy underpinning it.
With the support of a dedicated team of volunteer Water Ambassadors, they have daily logs of water availability at all 32 scheme reservoirs they monitor. This quality data generation and analysis—together with community education and mobilisation, local government engagement, and media advocacy—has helped to focus attention on the systemic issues plaguing ADM and the regional water scheme. This attention has led ADM to prioritise the refurbishment of the scheme. In May 2023, it signed a three-year contract with engineering consultants, Mariswe, for the refurbishment of the water scheme, with R6.5 million allocated for the first year.
Since the state of refurbishment, which has been influenced by our data, there has been a marked improvement in the scheme’s overall performance.
Real Reform for ECD - Right to ECD:
The Equality Collective is co-founder of the Real Reform for Early Childhood Development—a movement advocating for an enabling legal, policy, and regulatory environment that ensures all young children in South Africa have access to ECD services. They provide the coordination and secretariat support for RR4ECD, while serving on its elected Steering Committee, which is responsible for realising the Movement’s strategy and achieving its objectives. RR4ECD is currently working with over 600 ECD practitioners across four provinces and is supported by over 200 organisations.
In a relatively short period of time, the movement has again seen notable successes
They have successfully advocated for the adoption of evidence-informed reforms to the ECD provisions in the Children’s Act. They have helped contribute to the development of a draft Bill that they hope will be tabled before Parliament in 2024. This Bill will significantly address many of the challenges the sector faces.
They work with 600 ECD practitioners across four provinces on their ‘Make Local Government Work for ECD’ campaign. A key goal of this campaign is to ensure that local governments prioritise, plan, and budget appropriately for ECD and remove barriers to registration and expansion of ECD services.
In November 2023 they launched their ‘Right to Nutrition’ campaign calling on the DBE to provide nutritional support to all ECD programmes, regardless of their registration status. The campaign rests on collaborative research—now published in the form of three research papers and a synthesis report. The DBE has officially announced its plans to conduct a Pilot programme next year to explore the feasibility of establishing a national ECD nutrition initiative. Furthermore, the DBE collaborated with Real Reform for ECD in this endeavor, acknowledging their research as a fundamental framework for helping shape the direction of their Pilot programme.
The work and achievements of the Equality Collective are the result of collective efforts, where partnerships and the cultivation of collective power play a pivotal role in driving meaningful change.
