Mama's Lunch

In Kenya's urban low income communities, women running thousands of informal childcare enterprises with an average of 10 children each are unable to offer quality and affordable childcare to them, besides growing and expanding their services, because they often have to use their resources to feed children. In most facilities, some parents bring leftover food for their children which gets stale during the day. High cost of cooking fuel forces caregivers to warm the foods by dipping them in warm water which does not kill micro-organisms. Some parents, however, bring some money (usually $0.20) in order for the caregiver to buy some food for the child. 

However, this amount is barely enough and forces the caregiver to buy a basic meal of 'white rice and soup' only for the child. Most of the time, however, parents do not bring any feed and the caregiver usually has to find a means to provide food for the children-a situation that is not just stressful, but also depletes her meagre earnings. In the process, young children's health and wellbeing becomes grossly undermined, and the caregivers' are unable to offer quality childcare services in return.

Mama's Lunch is an affordable childcare food solution developed by local women food vendors and Nawirisha Childcare Services Ltd., to provide 'fresh and nutritious meals' to young children in informal childcare facilities, thereby improving the quality of childcare services and the health and well being of young children. Mama's Lunch entails local women food vendors receiving food orders from childcare facilities, centrally sourcing food supplies, preparing nutritious meals and delivering them to childcare facilities within their community. This process ensures that food quality is controlled and that women make use of the economies of scale in sourcing food supplies and food production, thereby significantly lowering the cost of food to a price that most parents in the urban informal settlements can afford. 

Further, fees for meals  (K.sh. 30) is remitted by individual parents to a 'pool fund' managed by appointed food vendors and Nawirisha, who in return issue weekly 'payouts' to all food vendors as per the number of meals supplied during the week. On average, a food vendor distributing food to 50 children earns a minimum of K.sh.500 for her labor, exclusive of other costs. 

Finally, new food vendors are usually supported with a food supplies advance equivalent to K.sh. 5000, which ensures they can cook and deliver food to allocated facilities. This money, considered as start-up capital, is gradually recovered from the vendor's daily earnings over a period of about 6 months.

Being in its pilot phase, Mama's lunch relies on Whatsapp Group, phone calls and text messages to order and deliver meals to childcare facilities, a process that requires to be automated as we scale up the solution to reach more informal childcare facilities, engage more food vendors, and introduce delivery agents.  Currently, management of food orders, supplies, food production, delivery, and payouts are done jointly with the women food vendors. 

The solution serves informal childcare entrepreneurs and the young children under their care. By providing an affordable childcare food program, we are supporting the women childcare entrepreneurs who are grossly marginalized from access to critical services for food, space design, play materials, emergency healthcare, and finance to begin accessing these services, thereby formalizing their childcare enterprise to offer quality and affordable childcare services to all children. By accessing fresh and ready meals for children under their care, women caregivers will be able to channel their resources and efforts in quality caregiving instead of food provision, thereby leading to growth and expansion of their childcare enterprises-which will ensure that all children in informal settlements can access quality care. 

Quality services such as the food program will also in return enable children in child care facilities to be healthy and thrive. Currently, children in these facilities are reported to often suffer diarrhoea outbreaks and malnutrition, a challenge which can be largely arrested if children in the facilities are fed on good food.

Finally, Mama's lunch also creates a platform for the often marginalized women food vendors to get into a stable food production and distribution enterprise 

This solution has been developed by local community's women food vendors and Nawirisha Childcare Services Ltd., the latter being a group of young women who have been working in the last 1 year to enumerate and organize groups of informal childcare entrepreneurs in order to create a 'collective' that enables them to negotiate and access critical services such as food programs, besides influencing policy and regulations. The child care food program emerged in the past year as the most critical need, among others, when vast consultations were held with childcare entrepreneurs where they cited using their own resources to provide food to children under their care as a major hindrance to quality child care service provision and growth. Other needs cited were access to services like space design, play materials, emergency healthcare, and micro-finance.

On the other hand, the food vendors are women who have been producing and selling food to school children and adults at their small food kiosks within the community. As a result, they are people who are well versed with the challenges that informal childcare entrepreneurs face providing food to young children under their care, because more often than not, they buy food for children from these vendors. 

Mama's Lunch is, therefore, a community led solution for a food and childcare community challenge facing the most vulnerable members of the community (children and women), and therefore engages community members in design and implementation. 

We are applying to Solve in order to access technical and financial support to continue piloting our solution throughout next year and scale it up during the second year. Having started small with only 6 women food vendors and 30 informal childcare enterprises that provide care to 300 young children, we believe our solution is viable, but would need further support to expand the scope of piloting, before it can be scaled up across Kenya and to other African countries. 

In terms of technical support; our solution currently uses very basic technology to manage orders and supplies i.e.Whatsapp group, as well as SMS technology and phone calls. Informal settlements have diverse challenges due to poverty levels. Although many women have told us that they have smartphones, most of the women rarely communicate via the Whatsapp group and sometimes it is difficult to reach them on phone calls. We, however, believe that technologies such as USSD backed platforms blend with a Mobile application would ensure that all our service users have an option for placing orders, remitting pay, as well as monitoring and accessing reports. Bearing in mind our efforts to continue learning and developing further solutions to enhance establishment of a sustainable childcare infrastructure, a technology that is also developed with capacity to collect useful data, analyse and disseminate into usable reports will enable us to generate evidence on percentage of parents able to afford meals for their children, in order to help government and donor stakeholders to establish a 'Childcare Food Subsidy program.'

Further, we hope that through Solve we shall access funders who would be interested in supporting such an early stage solution in order to cushion us during these pilot stages as we build a supply chain for food in childcare facilities, besides supporting the informal facilities to formalize, grow and thrive. Such a funder, would also be highly interested in learning more about models of early childhood care such as the 'informal childcare enterprise' in homes and churches in the informal settlements, and testing ways in which such a model can be improved and scaled up across other African cities where childcare needs are dire.

Our solution to the childcare food challenge is innovative because it entails creation of a new 'food production and distribution system' for informal childcare facilities, which has not existed before. In Kenya, we have not yet come across any 'large scale child care food program' ; instead, individual childcare entrepreneurs cook for children whose parents can afford to pay, while all others are required to bring food from home. This approach has proved difficult for mothers and childcare enterprises in urban informal settlements. 

Second, this solution is innovative because it puts 'local women food entrepreneurs' at the centre of solution design and implementation-including food production and management supplies, orders, and payments. The women will continue to be engaged in management of the solution because they know better the food challenge facing childcare facilities.

Engaging local women entrepreneurs also ensures that the solution can be scaled up with ease, through recruitment of more women in other communities and countries, thereby, enabling the solution to reach masses of children and informal childcare entrepreneurs.

Finally, we believe this solution is innovative because it incorporates new approaches to sustaining an 'affordable child care food program' such as establishment of a 'Pool Fund' where parents pay for meals as they are able to afford, thereby enabling cushioning of parents who are unable to afford meals during certain times of the month. The solution will also gradually adopt advanced technologies for meal programs' management, thereby, creating efficiency in the long term. 

With these new approaches, we believe the solution will absolutely transform the childcare landscape and begin the formation of a sustainable childcare infrastructure to support thriving childcare enterprises and guarantee quality and affordable care to all children.

In the next year, we aim to provide affordable, fresh and nutritious meals to 5000 young children in (500) informal childcare facilities. This will be achieved by increasing the number of food vendors from the current 6 to 100, each providing meals to at least 50 young children. With a network of over 1000 childcare entrepreneurs who are currently taking care of over 10,000 young children, we would like our focus on meals provision alone and scaling these numbers to be our priority, in order to guarantee every child a quality and safe meal.

During the next five years, however, we shall scale up our impact in terms of numbers to reach more than 50,000 young children in Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nakuru (urban cities in Kenya). Our initial work in Kisumu has also revealed the existence of similar informal childcare facilities in other urban cities of Kenya, just as those found in Nairobi. To reach these numbers, we aim to recruit more local food vendors, digitize food program management, recruit more food delivery agents, and catalyze the formation of 'local networks for childcare entrepreneurs' in new urban cities, in order to anchor this program. 

The next five years will also be a period for us to immerse ourselves in deepening our understanding of issues such as nutritional needs among diverse children; food affordability rate among parents; as well growth & development impact of the food program on young children in the urban informal settlements among others. This shall be done by analysing qualitative and quantitative data collected in the first 2 years (this year & next year) and subsequent years, especially, percentage of parents who are able to afford food, as well as the growth & developmental impact of the food program on young children. With this data, we aim to engage and work with government and donor stakeholders to help establish a "Child care subsidy program" over the next 10 years, once we are able to know the percentage of parents who are not able to regularly afford food for their young children. 

1. Number of 'fresh and nutritious meals served' for young children

2. Number of young 'children fed on nutritious meals' from the program

3. Number of informal childcare 'facilities accessing meals' through the program

4. Percentage of 'meals fully paid for' by parents/childcare facilities

5. Percentage of 'food supplies advance repaid' by new food vendors

Being at a very small scale, with 6 food vendors, 30 childcare enterprises, and 300 children, our solution is using basic technologies i.e. Whatsapp group, SMS, and Phone calls to manage orders and supplies. Food is also distributed by the women food vendors to the childcare enterprises/facilities, a process that allows them to learn and collect direct feedback from the child caregivers in order to improve the food quality and service. 

As the numbers increase, however, we aim to develop and adopt more suitable and efficient technologies for supply chain management, a key reason that is motivating us to apply to Solve. Such a technology, however, would be developed with the understanding of the users' challenges in  access to the internet and smartphones, in order to make it effective and useful for this solution. 

Currently, our team  comprises both young and older women, between the ages of 26 and 45 years. The Nawirisha team is led by 3 young women (29-32 yrs) while the food vendors team is led by women aged between 26-45 yrs. This entire team also hails from different ethnic backgrounds, a factor we are conscious about bearing in mind ethnic division in our country. As the solution and entrie food program grows, including Nawirisha itself, we aim to apply Gender Based Analysis Plus criteria in recruitment and solution implementation, in order to ensure that we are not discriminatory and that our services benefit the marginalized as intended.

To reach the most unreachable informal childcare entrepreneurs &  service providers, we also use a 'snowballing' approach, where we work with community leaders to identify key women in the childcare enterprise, who then go door to door to identify others who also offer childcare services. These women then form 'local networks for women childcare entrepreneurs' in every Ward, and select network coordinators who become critical in ensuring 'food safety' and improved access by all informal facilities. 

Currently, we are bootstrapping in order to fund the piloting of this solution-a situation that has made us limit our scope of piloting. 

Nawirisha, however, also understands that childcare cannot be a truly profitable venture, hence, we are approaching financially sustainability through a hybrid model that entails:

1. Grants from donors in order to fund main operations at Nawirisha, sustain the women's leadership team, beef up the Kitchen-startup kitty that is advanced to every new food vendor, as well as cushion meals revenue against defaulted/delayed meal payments by parents

2. Meal payment fee remitted to a 'pool fund' account by parents. This amount only covers the cost of food supplies, food production, and labor-in order to maintain meals at $0.20 and porridge at $0.10, which most parents can afford. Even then, not all parents are able to pay regularly, hence, the 'pool fund' and subsidy.

3. Finally, during the expansion phase, we aim to charge a registration fee for both food vendors & delivery agents in order to cover part of the 'branding costs' including food containers, delivery bags, and Aprons.

We are in the process of raising funds by approaching different funders. Currently, we are boot-strapping to fund the activities, as well as relying on meal payments from parents to pay for food supplies and production costs. So far, not all parents are able to pay consistently (30%), hence, we have been providing a subsidy to cushion the food vendors. Our meals are priced at $0.20 per plate, and porridge $0.10 per cup.