Nawirisha: Organizing Women Childcare Entrepreneurs in Africa for Growth and Development

The Nawirisha initiative aims to help transform the quality of 'early childhood care' for young children in Africa's urban low income communities, by investing in the growth and development of women's informal childcare enterprises through:

Organizing and Networking Women in Childcare Enterprise

Aggregating Access to Affordable Nutritious Food for Children

Catalyzing Continuous Peer-Learning and Grassroots Advocacy

Borrowing its name from a swahili word “nawirisha” which means “make thrive,” the initiative’s vision is thriving young children in a Care economy anchored by women’s childcare enterprises, a suitably qualified workforce, enabling operational policies and governments good will.

In Kenya’s urban low income settings, women have taken up the mantle of ‘early childhood care service provision’ by starting ‘informal childcare enterprises’ within their homes, centers, and churches, to care for young children while their mothers go to work. Here, children as young as 1 week old are left under their care in exchange for 0.50 dollars per day. Informal childcare enterprises host tens of thousands of young children below 4 years, where on average one can host 10 children for more than 8 hrs a day. We estimate that there are more than 10,000 informal childcare enterprises in Kenya’s urban low income communities (alone) which remain unregulated and grossly under-served.

Such informal facilities include Betty’s home-care, which hosts 15 young children every day, within Nairobi’s Mathare informal settlement. Like her peers, Betty has been depending on mothers to bring packed food for their children. However, this has often proven ineffective and frustrating because they often fail to bring the food, and when they do it is rarely nutritionally balanced. Sometimes, however, some of the mothers who have to rush to work bring sh.10 or 20 for child caregivers to buy street food for the children. Other times, mothers with under 1 year old children encourage the informal childcare entrepreneurs to feed children on water and tea, thereby causing delayed introduction to solid meals. 

The Nawirisha Initiative is mobilizing and organizing women informal childcare entrepreneurs in Nairobi's Mathare settlement to access aggregated Affordable & Nutritious Food services by local women food vendors. In October/November 2022, more than 4000 meal orders were delivered to approx. 15  informal childcare enterprises!

In 2023, we aim to organize 100 women informal childcare entrepreneurs to access 360,000+ affordable, nutritious breakfast and lunches from 10 local women food vendors =saving the childcare enterprises time, money, and drastically improving the quality of early childhood care services they offer!