While it might not be a gift you can wrap in pretty paper, it’s certainly one that’s tied with love. The Santa Shoebox Project and friends have begun work on the Siphiwe Samangwe Créche!
Loskop, South Africa (09 May 2025) — The Santa Shoebox Project is known for its beautifully wrapped, helpful gifts that uplift the spirits of children across the country during the festive season yearly. However, every once in a while they help make other gifts that can’t be wrapped possible, like the new Siphiwe Samangwe Créche.
In Loskop, work has officially begun on the new créche. It’s premised to help more budding learners (eighty of them, in fact) access education and care at an Early Childhood Development (ECD) level!
This comes by way of the Santa Shoebox Project’s (SSP) Legacy chapter.
According to the team, SSP Legacy is focused on making permanent change possible for children who are beneficiaries of the SSP. They do this through establishing new ECD Centres, transforming those already in existence and enhancing focus areas like practitioner training and installing reading corners.
So far, the SSP have finished five ‘builds’, with the most recent being the Zisizeni Créche.
Zisizeni was completed in 2024 and boasts two classrooms that serve forty children in the uThukela District (KwaZulu-Natal). Additionally, there are important and exciting amenities there, from a kitchen to a playground and a vegetable garden.
As for the Siphiwe Samangwe créche-to-be, the SSP team already shared a video of the project site.
More About the Santa Shoebox Project
The SSP ensure that thousands of children in under-resourced communities and schools get to enjoy the magic of the festive season yearly. With the help of volunteers, pledgers and a schedule that rival’s Santas, they organise and distribute shoeboxes filled with essential and fun goodies for kids in different age-groups.
You can learn more about what they do and how to get involved, here.
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