How can early life gender and social inequalities be overcome by innovations in childcare and adult learning?

• In Event: Achieving equality in and through education: The power of breaking regressive gender norms in low- and middle-income countries

Proposal

Women in urbanized Africa are the most marginalized with urban advantage being wiped out. 85% of women in Africa who will become mothers, will contend with childcare responsibilities, imposing a handbrake on their ability to earn on par with men, creating a childcare penalty. Mothers with poor access to learning, technology, and capital and whose restricted agency to determine economic and educational pathways out of their poverty trap, perpetuates poverty across generations. How can these systemic societal limitations be overcome?

Tiny Totos, is a Kenyan social enterprise working to overcome the childcare hurdle that prevents women from meaningfully participating economically alongside men. With no state support for childcare, women turn to neighbours to look after their children. In Nairobi, 4,000+ babysitters look after 250,000 children daily, with no investment, knowledge, or oversight, leading to poor quality care and low, unreliable service returns. Consequently, mothers with unreliable childcare are disrupted economically, with potential exposure to poor quality care in their children's formative years lowering their full potential.

Tiny Totos’ model has turned the childcare crisis into an opportunity, using a user-centred design approach, by crafting a childcare entrepreneurship incubation programme and network that provides ad hoc community babysitters training in business and childcare management to turn erratic babysitting into a robust, profitable business. Starting with a deep dive boot camp training programme covering key pillars of learning required to run a childcare business, content which is reinforced throughout the carers’ membership of the network in person and via an e-learning programme and app, and carers’ access to a tailor-made education programme. This transforms their businesses and sense of self, typically doubling returns. Mothers in the network get access to community, childcare learning, and savings training. Both owners and parents access a phone-based app to track their business performance and payments for childcare. Small loans based on these earnings and payment for childcare are issued using alternative credit screening systems that low-income women qualify. Both owners and parents earn loyalty points from earnings and payments for childcare, which can be redeemed against loans or for purchases of childcare services. Overall, Tiny Totos’ innovations in childcare, adult learning and credit have transformed the informal childcare ecosystem, providing care benefits that transform female owners and mothers’ ability to chart better economic futures for themselves. The model points to the need for new paradigm shifts that take advantage of technology and social network to aggregate fragmented informal markets and provide new channels of access to learning and economic opportunity to overcome decades of women’s economic marginalization in Africa.

Author

• Karungari Wachira, TINY TOTOS KENYA LIMITED