What is the name of your organization?
Tiny Totos Kenya
What is the name of your solution?
Tiny Totos
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
By digitizing and monetizing transactions in the informal childcare economy, Tiny Totos has built a robust creditworthiness tool for unbanked women to borrow against.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Nairobi
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
—
What type of organization is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
—
What specific problem are you solving?
Tiny Totos is addressing women's lack of financial inclusion, which affects women worldwide. The gender earning gap also directly impacts the child care penalty. For women in Africa, becoming a mother disrupts their ability to work, save, build credit history, and take risks.
What is your solution?
Tiny Totos is a Kenyan social enterprise working to transform the informal child care market and turn the child care crisis into an opportunity. Our incubation model helps ad hoc babysitters become profitable child care entrepreneurs through coaching, networking, technology, and capital. Each daycare Tiny Totos works with unlocks the ability of 50 other women to work, creating a community of economic opportunity for marginalised women. Most of its partners need capital to improve their rudimentary care spaces. However, because community babysitters lack conventional assets such as property, fixed jobs, or savings, Tiny Totos could not find any banks or MFIs willing to take a risk on them. It therefore set up a loan facility of its own, using earnings from child care (owners) or payments for child care (parents) as alternative ways to determine credit for our members, drawing on digitised payment records.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Those who live will benefit most from our intervention include: 1. Lower-income children. Preschool children suffer enormously in informal settlements from inadequate access to clean water, electricity and health facilities, poor nutrition, education and sanitation services. They may survive, but will not thrive in these settings. 2. Low-income working mothers. Mothers in the informal economy, who are typically unskilled and undereducated, earn at or below the poverty line. 3. Women childcare providers. Often the least skilled and unemployable in the community, they pursue daycare as a default livelihood, not a vocation, earning little and receiving no support.
Our intervention prioritises these disadvantaged groups, addressing the core need that holds them back from fulfilling their full potential: a lack of childcare.
