If you have gone through the different parts of our website, you’re probably familiar with our simple logic of impacting development: educating mothers to autonomously provide nutritious foods to their children while keeping them in a clean environment. This means that mothers need to be able to leave their home for job opportunities in the city or to run their small businesses.
In one of our focus group discussion with the Entoto community we asked them to whom they left their youngest children with when they were absent. The answer was shocking! They leave them outside the house to play with neighbouring children until they come back, and this, without any appointed caregiver. They said adults that are around generally look out for them so they are not in danger. Fine, but what about meals? Cleaning? Nap? All these things that a child needs to grow-up with! We absolutely needed to find a solution to this.
The concept of the community day-care center is that every mother who wants to put her child in the center has to volunteer at the center at least once a week. This helps us reduce the number of permanent staff to hire but also enables these mothers to exchange their experience on childcare and nutrition. They also have to pay a monthly fee indexed on their revenue because on one side it will give them the ability to demand a good service; and on the other hand it will empower them because they are not being aided.
The center will require a full-time cook and two permanent babysitters in order to be ran properly. The financial contribution of the mothers will only cover 25% of the amount needed for rent and for the salary of the three permanent staff. And this is why we need sponsors. As such, this component of our program will not be self-sustainable at the end of our project, hence this project has been designed to only give service to mothers who are already beneficiaries of our programs until their hcildren reach school age.