Accessibility statement

The Nairobi Childcare Community of Practice

Investing in caregivers and children during the critical period between birth and five years of a child’s life can have long-lasting benefits in the life of the child. In Kenya's urban slums, children face significant challenges to healthy development, particularly when their families need to earn a daily wage and cannot care for them during the day. Informal, private day-care has developed in response to these challenges; however, centre caregivers are untrained, and quality is poor. The government has made progress in developing early childhood development guidelines to improve day-care quality but struggles to operationalize these.

Therefore, the community of practice (CoP) project aim to co-design with childcare-centre providers, county officials and other non-governmental organisations in the childcare space (Kidogo), and to test the feasibility of a system for supportive assessment and skills building of community health volunteers, with the long-term vision of improving the quality of paid childcare services for children in poor urban settings. We are working with our partners African Population and Health Research Centre. For an update on the project's progress, please read the latest blog from the APHRC team.

We have developed a manual to support community health teams to implement the intervention to support centre-based childcare, download a copy via this link Implementation manual (PDF , 4,077kb)

Our project is part of the Urbanisation and Health Network which brings together researchers from across departments and disciplines working on urbanisation and its impacts on health. Please go to the Urbanisation and Health Network page to see upcoming events and members.

 

Public Health and Society Research in the Department of Health Sciences