Economic Empowerment of Young and Old Women with a Focus on Childcare Work in Kiambu County, Kenya

Abstract

Childcare is one of the occupations undertaken by women during their reproductive age and
many times, they get bogged down in it and are unable to engage in productive work. However,
the economic situation prevailing in the world today demands that women engage in productive
work, which demands that they hire services of a house help. This forces them to leave their
homes and engage in productive work because childcare makes them dependent and poor.
Recently, in Kenya, there has been an emergence of a group mostly of elderly women who are
now providing home-based childcare services to the younger and productive women, who now
attend their productive work while the old women look after the children. This was an
indigenous African society phenomenon where the grandmothers used to look after the
children. Today, those grandmothers and the younger women do not normally share the same
homesteads. Young women invite groups of older women into their spaces who are taking their
time off, or they use their spaces to care for these young women's children. They provide them
with childcare work. The younger women bring food, diapers and clothes to ease the work of
the older women’s childcare while they become economically productive, while the older
women also get economically empowered through income earned from their childcare work,
hence meeting their needs, especially at this time of their age when they are not energetic
enough to engage in productive work outside their areas of occupation. This economic structure
benefits both the young and the old women. The study was guided by the theory of change in
the Thika sub-county of Kiambu County using online questionnaires. This was conducted in
June 2024, and a total of 37 respondents participated. The purpose of this study was to establish
whether the cooperation between old women and young mothers in childcare contributes to
their economic empowerment; and if the structure can be regularised and up-scaled to ease the
burden of women in navigating their multiple roles as assigned by the society. The findings
indicated that young women's work is greatly affected by childcare, and the availability of older
women to assist in childcare is instrumental to their productivity and stability in economic
development. The study rested on the premise that this structure should be studied to see the
role it can play in enhancing women's economic capacity in both categories. This can be
achieved through government formulation of the structure in policies such as Vision 2030 on
the socioeconomic pillar