Cape Town — It's crucial to stimulate children within the first 1,000 days of their development, according to speakers at the "Towards Carnegie III" conference.

The conference, being held in Cape Town, is taking a critical look at the current measures to address poverty and inequality in South Africa in order to inform future research and improve strategies for combating the challenges they pose.

A conference session on the needs of children before schoolgoing age emphasised that the social environment in low-income areas often leads to the stunted development of children, 80 percent of whom have no access to early childhood development programmes outside the home.

Establishing new programmes is hindered by the cumbersome process of registering them, the conference heard.

The conference also discussed the demand for more services for children in their own communities.

"It's important to take services to people where they are based," said Sherri Le Mottee of Ilifa Labantwana a donor platform that facilitates programmes in the field.

"We think that there's a problem at the moment that the focus of policy and financing... is on early childhood centres. And the reality is that where [people] ... are most affected by poverty, centres are not accessible either geographically or because of cost issues."

She pointed out that it's important to offer a range of services for children most affected by poverty, whether home visits to offer support to caregivers or playgroups and mobile clinics.

Linda Biersteker of the Sombambisana community development programme in Cape Town added that home visiting boosted the use of child services due to referrals by community workers.

The key question, according to Andy Dawes of the University of Cape Town, is how to expand quality child services so they are generally available and not confined to pockets.