Improving the Quality of Day-Care Centres in Nairobi Through ‘Community of Practice’ and Co-Designing the Operationalisation of the National Early Childhood Development Guidelines in Nairobi

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 but care-givers are untrained and quality is poor. The government has made progress in developing early childhood development (ECD) guidelines to improve day-care quality but struggles to operationalise these. The overall purpose of this project is to co-design a system to implement government ECD guidelines through skills building of care-givers and monitoring of day-care centres to improve the quality of care for children in poor urban settings. After mapping quality of day-care providers, this project will use quantitative, qualitative and cost-benefit methods to evaluate impact.

Research Team: Dr Helen Elsey, University of York; Dr Margaret Nampijja, African Population and Health Research Center, Kenya; Dr Elizabeth Kimani-Murage, African Population and Health Research Centre, Kenya; Dr Patricia Kadzo Kitsao-Wekulo, African Population and Health Research Center, Kenya