Kenya: We are Keeping Watch, with Children in Tow, Until the Floods Subside

It is now more than two weeks since we began making plans for our community meetings and consultations with the local leaders of Nairobi’s expansive informal settlement of Mathare. The meetings with local chiefs and neighborhood leaders are aimed at breaking ground for the testing of our new ‘community-led child care policy’ model, which aims at helping improve regulation and standardization of informal child care services, through a process led by women, for the women and their children.

This initiative stemmed from our observation that women’s child care enterprises in Kenya’s urban informal settlements exist far below the radar, isolated and disconnected from very basic services like food and healthcare support, hence they would take forever to formalize and attain national standards for Early Childhood Development. As a result, we figured that perhaps facilitating the women to organize and collaborate with local leaders to design and implement a progressive ‘Self-Regulation Mechanism,’ may potentially enable every woman informal child care provider to gradually transform her facility and attain the set minimum quality standards. This would also be a more-friendly approach, and could eventually enable them to offer better child care services, attain registration status, and grow into more permanent and sustainable enterprises. 

As a beneficiary of the African Early Childhood Network’s (AfECN) advocacy seed grant, we began laying ground for this important work, which if successful, would place the women of Mathare in the steering wheel of policy development; by enabling them to create their own ‘table’ for child care policy decision-making and influence. This would squarely position them in control of the informal child care enterprise development narrative, thereby ensuring that their voices on the transformation of child care in Kenya truly count. 

In Africa and around the world, child care is mainly an unpaid and underpaid role often left to women, for whom it is a job of last resort, especially if one is unskilled. According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), “Women who work as child care providers can’t provide for their own families. The more than 1.2 million women working in the child care field feel these constraints especially acutely, as many are paid too little to support—or afford child care for—their own families.” However, this narrative can be shifted by mobilizing, organizing, and harnessing women's agency to push for increased public and private investments, thereby transforming child care into a rewarding profession with economically viable enterprises. Child care is about women and their economic empowerment, perhaps the reason why across the world it remains grossly under-funded and under-developed, as fewer women voices make it to the decision-making table and take part in cutting the national budgetary cake. Indeed, is it not child care that sincerely holds women from going back to work? Is it not child care that makes girls in some of our African countries miss education? Is it not child care that makes teenage moms fail to go back to school no matter how much they would want? 

In a country like Kenya, thousands of women have taken the bull by its horns and volunteered to care for children in their neighborhoods, so that fellow mothers can go to work and girls can go to school. Yet, despite their noble role of anchoring their communities, the women are regularly harassed by local authorities for operating unregistered child care businesses in their homes and churches, as these facilities barely meet commonly acceptable standards. As a result, they are forced to operate in isolation and hiding, a situation that further alienates them from accessing basic public and private services. But the reality of informal settlements is such that nearly all ‘acceptable standards’ do not apply, be it in housing, sanitation, healthcare, education, security and more. That is why as Nawirisha, we are helping them mobilize and organize to lead the change they would like to see in their community’s informal child care system, because only they can be able to clearly articulate it.  The envisioned change would not only help transform children’s health and well-being, but also help secure women’s economic empowerment. 

Unfortunately, these efforts continue to suffer the devastating impact of Climate change on Kenya’s urban informal settlements like Mathare. Fresh from a seriously intestine-twisting drought, now Kenya is battling torrential downpours which last many hours nearly every day, causing unwarranted floods everywhere even on the highways! The vast community of Mathare’s informal settlement has not been spared either, with the river breaking and sweeping away tens of shanties, and nearly everything in them including children. Reports by Aljazeera indicate that, “According to the Nairobi county governor’s office, an estimated 60,000 people, mostly women and children, have been “severely affected by the floods. Homes were engulfed in the sprawling Nairobi slum of Mathare, where residents took to rooftops to save their lives and belongings.”

The more I think about this havoc, the more my mind cannot help but wonder if there is a woman who has probably been swept away in her house with children under her care. Women informal child care providers sometimes host up to 30 very young children in their homes, where they care for them from dawn until late in the night when their mothers (often sole-breadwinners) return. Many of them have confessed to me how they are forced to let children sleep-over in their homes when parents fail to return on time. But, assuming this worst case scenario hasn’t happened yet, if you have been lucky to visit a large informal settlement you’d know that drainage, sanitation, roofing, ventilation, electrical wiring, piped water are some of the most pressing needs of the communities. With flooding, even inside the shanties, young children are not only at risk of diseases such as cholera outbreak, but also cold, and even electrocution. 

The thing is, we are now living in extraordinary times that require extraordinary measures if at all we are going to save future generations. Our actions for climate change cannot be business as usual. We are faced with a growing catastrophe, one we have not yet figured how to contain. While the storm our country faces now will fade in the weeks ahead, its impact on children’s lives in communities like Mathare will continue to be felt long after. Yet, the increasing disproportionate impact of climate change on children and women, especially in urban low income neighborhoods continues to be underestimated with little or no measures being put in place. 

Regardless of our action or inaction, I know one thing for sure; with every flood and every drought, women such as the informal child care providers of Mathare will continue to do the best they can to pull their communities together and secure children's lives. And, unless their band of strength finally breaks, we as Nawirisha, will continue to keep watch with them until the waters subside. Then, we shall hit the ground running to rally community leaders, and together chat a community-led policy pathway that may perhaps help the women face another catastrophe more courageously, with children less at risk.