The Annual General Meeting of Cotlands took place on Tuesday, 8 September 2020 and was held as the first virtual AGM meeting.

Dr Monica Stach, CEO of Cotlands welcomed all stakeholders and Cotlanders (our employees) to the AGM. Monica then called on Cotlands Chairman, Dumisani Ncala to officially open the 76^th Annual General Meeting and adopt the minutes from last year’s meeting.

In the financial year under review, Cotlands has played an instrumental role in impacting the lives of vulnerable children that can be quantified as follows:

• Cotlanders have empowered, engaged and supported 10 942 children to play through our direct service delivery (toy libraries and early learning playgroups) as well as through our partnered projects and capacity-building programmes.
• Cotlands provided 372 017 meals through the early learning playgroup programme.
• Annually Cotlands assesses children’s growth in their school readiness by administering baseline and summative assessments. This year we saw an improvement of 23% in these scores. The increase is as a result of focusing on the regular attendance of the children, continuous professional development of practitioners and regular on-site support and mentoring.

At the meeting the Chairperson, CEO and Treasurer provided an overview of their leadership reports for the fiscal period under review. Some of the key highlights presented from the leadership trio include:

• Cotlands made a strategic decision (Cotlands Strategy 100) during the year to launch CotlandsIGNITE™ an online training platform to give unqualified/underqualified practitioners an accredited Early Childhood Development (ECD) qualification. The ultimate goal is that the online platform will make recognition of prior learning (RPL) and ECD course material more accessible and affordable. There is currently a skills gap in the sector; 350 000 ECD practitioners and assistants lack an accredited qualification.
• The training revenue contribution for 2020 remained low at 2%. In the future we expect to see a substantial increase in training revenue generated through CotlandsIGNITE™
• We have strategically classified our business into three segments: programmes, projects and training.
• This year 60% of our programme income was from donations; government service level agreements generated 28% and foreign funding revenue contributed 12%.

Cotlands board and leadership team remain committed to good governance, sound accounting principles and ethical conduct.

Motseki Majake, Nazir Alli, Tatiana Page, Janet Du Preez, Phumzile Booi, Niven Postma, Neil Maslen, Marcelle Arnold were re-elected to the Board of Directors.

Cotlands bids farewell to longstanding board members, Chairperson Dumisani Ncala and board member Michal Bolanowski. We would like to thank both Dumi and Michal for their dedication, length of service and volunteering their expertise to Cotlands over the many years.

Marie-Louise Samuels and Nwabisa Qwanyashe were elected as new members to the Board of Directors for the ensuing years.

The audited 2020 Annual Financial Statements were adopted and the meeting re-elected LSG Integrated as auditors for the next financial period until the next AGM in 2021.

The entire AGM is available to view online via the Cotlands website, https://www.cotlands.org/annual_reports/