When Peninah Ndegwa walked through Nairobi's Gikomba market, she noticed a room the size of a closet between the men's and women's washrooms, with cardboard boxes on the ground and toddlers lying in them.
The tiny room was the market's poorly staffed childcare space for venders.
"I was very concerned," said Ndegwa, a mother and urban planner, who said the market was "overcrowded and not child-friendly at all."
Ndegwa, who founded the social enterprise Wow Mom in 2019, had already spearheaded an initiative to install diaper-changing stations in Nairobi’s public washrooms. So she took on the room’s renovation to make it more child-friendly. She installed cabinets to maximize storage space, brightened up the room with colourful posters and added a sleeping area and floor mats to upgrade from the cardboard boxes.
"Before we knew it, children started flocking in," Ndegwa said.
With more children using the space, she couldn't rest until she knew their growing needs would be met: “I called the county government and said, 'Can you provide a teacher? It [the market] is your property.' The government said they wanted to, but that providing daycare in a market was not at the top of their list.”
Wow Mom launches childcare facilities in markets
Ndegwa convinced the Nairobi County government to provide a larger room in the market and cover the cost of utilities. In turn, Wow Mom would offer affordable, high-quality daycare for low-income parents.
"We want to alleviate their unpaid care burden. Women spend four hours per day on childcare which means they have less time for their businesses," said Ndegwa.
After opening its first facility in Gikomba market, Wow Mom quickly expanded to a second location in the nearby Mwariro market.
Tucked at the back of the second floor of this market, 30 or so children aged six months to four years laugh and play in the Wow Mom childcare facility staffed by teachers. They eat nutritious meals, sing, play outdoors, nap, learn numeracy and participate in activities like colouring, beading and threading.
"We have to nurture them in language, cognition, physical, social and emotional [development] and nutrition," said Cecilia Luta, a teacher at Wow Mom.
The program and its facility contrast starkly with other daycares in Kenya, Luta added.
"[Most] caregivers are not trained so they just feed children and make them sleep,” she explained. “They don't do activities that can nurture the child to become somebody tomorrow."
Parents using the service echo these sentiments. For example, Philomena Nduku, who sells baskets in the Mwariro market, recalled her 2-year-old son's experience in another daycare.
"The children would be neglected. I would pick him up and his diapers would be soiled," she said.
Nduku knows that Wow Mom is equipped in a way that other low-income daycares are not, including with CCTV cameras and health and safety equipment. During morning drop-offs, each child's temperature is checked. Parents are required to complete an intake form specifying who can pick up the child and a login sheet tracks children's movements in and out of the facility.
Safe, quality care services for women’s economic empowerment
Wow Mom is also gathering evidence on the childcare needs of market vendors to advocate for broader policy action such as childcare facilities in more markets as well as other solutions to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care work.
This research is supported by Scaling Care Innovations in Africa, a five-year partnership between Global Affairs Canada and IDRC to transform unpaid care in sub-Saharan Africa.
The experiences of Mwariro market vendors illustrate the links between safe, quality childcare services and women’s economic empowerment.
The hour a day that Nduku used to spend dropping her son off and picking him up from the daycare would cut into her work time and earnings. Poor conditions and hygiene at the daycare would cause her son to get sick every month and lead to frequent hospital visits.
When Wow Mom opened in the market, Philomena jumped at the chance to enroll him. Since then, he has never had to visit a hospital.
"Wow Mom is a God-send," Philomena said. While she pays more for this childcare than the previous one, she reasons that the time, health and cost savings are well worth it. "I would rather invest in childcare instead of spending money on hospitals."
Standard-setting and preparing for expansion
Wow Mom’s Gikomba and Mwariro childcare centres are the only ones operating in a Nairobi market. The social enterprise is raising funds to expand and cover the county’s 45 markets, and eventually spread across Kenya.
To realize this goal, Wow Mom is working to set standards in childcare and co-design policy to regulate childcare facilities, in collaboration with government decision-makers and as a member of the government's gender sector working group.
As Kenya does not have a childcare facility policy, the work started from scratch and includes deciding on guidelines such as the size of facilities, the children-to-staff ratio, the daycare schedule, nutrition program and safety aspects. Ndegwa and her team are working on creating a toolkit of best practices to "showcase what needs to be done and how it needs to be done," she said.
"I believe each person deserves dignity," Ndegwa added. "A child who grows up in a market deserves to thrive just like a child from a privileged background."
The systemic change that Wow Mom is working towards could level the playing field in child development in Kenya and help increase the participation of women and girls in the economic, educational, political and leisure activities of their choice.
Top image: IDRC / Amar Nijhawan. Peninah Ndegwa (second from left), founder of the social enterprise Wow Mom, runs quality, affordable childcare services that employ qualified teachers such as (from left to right): Cecilia Luta, Elishipa Macharia and Faith Nyambura.