Let Nairobi's next infrastructure milestone move from pilot to policy

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Nairobi City County is in the midst of a quiet but significant urban evolution. Over the past year, through a deliberate partnership between the county government and Wow Mom Kenya, the city has begun building something most cities never bother to measure: a clear, data-backed picture of what it actually takes for a woman trader to thrive in Nairobi's markets.

The numbers that came back made the case for us.

A baseline study conducted by Dalberg Research, Wow Mom Kenya and BSD Group, with the support of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) across Nairobi's key market centres, found that the overwhelming majority of women traders, 84 per cent, rely on self-care arrangements for their children, largely because formal childcare remains too expensive or simply unavailable near their place of work. 

For most mothers, “self-care” means a child tied to the back while sorting tomatoes, or a toddler seated quietly beside a stall for eight hours, or for those without even that option, a day's income lost entirely.

This is not a gap in maternal effort. It is a gap in market design. And Nairobi County, to its credit, has chosen to treat it as exactly that.

The county did not need convincing that childcare matters to its markets. It has spent the last year proving it. The Mainstreaming Care Toolkit has been developed and launched.

 A multi-sectoral Care Technical Working Group is active and meeting. A draft policy on childcare in market centres in Nairobi County, shaped by the baseline findings and validated at a December workshop bringing together county departments, market committees, civil society and women traders themselves, has already been tabled for review.

We have also seen what this looks like in practice. At Wow Mom Kenya's pilot centres in Gikomba and Mwariro, women have told us, in their own words, what it means to work with a clear mind. As one trader, Miriam, put it after enrolling her son in a market-based childcare room: “I still check on him, but my mind is not divided anymore.” Multiply that clarity across a market, and the productivity gains are not anecdotal; they are the entire premise of the policy now under discussion.

The national picture makes Nairobi's case even more urgent. Kenya's first national time-use survey, conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 2021, found that women spend four and a half hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work, compared with under an hour for men, roughly five times the burden.

KNBS has since put a price on that invisible labour: Sh2.24 trillion in 2021, with women contributing Sh1.89 trillion of it,  a contribution that, were it counted, would rank among the largest sectors of Kenya's economy.

It is precisely this evidence that has pushed the State Department for Gender and Affirmative Action to finalise a Kenya National Care Policy. A county care policy for Nairobi's markets would not be an outlier. It would be the first concrete county-level expression of a direction national policy has already set.

The global evidence points the same way. The  International Finance Corporation (IFC) research on employer-supported childcare has found that investment in quality, accessible childcare reliably pays back through higher productivity, lower absenteeism and stronger workforce retention.

In Nigeria, an IFC study projected that every dollar invested in quality childcare would return three dollars in caregivers' income.

 And according to the World Bank, nearly 350 million children below primary-school age worldwide need childcare but have no access to it, a gap that costs economies dearly in lost female labour force participation, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Nairobi has the chance to be a city that closes that gap rather than absorbs its cost.

What distinguishes Nairobi's current moment is that the county is not being asked to discover a new problem. It has already named it, studied it and convened the right people around the table.

The baseline data, the Mainstreaming Care Toolkit and the Technical Working Group together form what amounts to a near-complete policy architecture.

The next step is the one that turns evidence into permanence: formal adoption of a county-level care policy that mainstreams childcare into how markets are planned, built and licensed. We propose this not as a critique of the work so far, but as its logical continuation, resting on four moves.

First, embed care in planning, by integrating childcare facilities into the design, renovation and licensing requirements for all 45 of Nairobi's gazetted markets, building on the standards already piloted in Gikomba and Mwariro.

Second, formalise quality by adopting the caregiver-to-child ratios, safety protocols and facility guidelines already drafted, so that consistency across the city does not depend on individual market initiative. Third, secure dedicated financing, moving care infrastructure from donor-supported pilots into a recurring line item within the county's capital expenditure framework, permanence rather than project-based goodwill.

Fourth, institutionalise reporting by tasking the existing Technical Working Group with annual public reporting on care access across county markets, so progress is tracked the same way the County already tracks revenue, sanitation or trade licensing.

Other cities offer a glimpse of what is possible when this groundwork becomes law. Bogotá pioneered the “Care Block” model of building care services directly into city infrastructure, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, is now adapting that model to its own informal settlements, which is proof that African cities can treat care as a matter of urban design rather than improvisation.

Nairobi, through the partnership it has already built, is positioned not merely to follow that example but to set its own regional standard, backed by a depth of local evidence few African cities have assembled.

Nairobi City County and its partners have done the harder part already: they have gathered the proof, built the tools and brought the right voices into the room. What remains is the final, achievable step, that is, translating a successful pilot and a robust evidence base into binding policy.

When that happens, the women who have carried both their trade and their children's safety on their backs for years will finally be working in a city designed deliberately around their full participation. That is not a cost to Nairobi's economy. On the evidence the County itself helped generate, it is one of the clearest investments the city can make.

- The writer is the founder & CEO, Wow Mom Kenya