July 19, 2024 / Alizah Merali, Chief of Staff, NurtureFirst
This article was originally published on the GDI website on June 5, 2024
Home-based childcare (HBCC) providers are the unsung heroes keeping together our global childcare system. Each day across the world, nearly 70% of children are looked after in home-based settings1. HBCC allows families to re-enter the workforce, secure a livelihood, and offers children a nurturing environment to develop essential skills critical for their brain development.
Yet, their work is happening in the shadows and is often unpaid, unrecognized, and under-supported — often resulting in significant stress being placed on these providers, along with missed opportunities to access resources that could enhance children’s future life outcomes. The current childcare system is working against HBCC providers in many ways, which begs the question: What does it take to prompt mindset and behavior changes for communities, decision-makers, and funders so that they consistently back, invest in, and acknowledge home-based childcare providers?
NurtureFirst, incubated by the Global Development Incubator (GDI), set out to explore this question. We are a capacity building funder collaborative working to improve the systems that support HBCC providers globally, so they can provide evidence-based, affordable, culturally relevant childcare wherever they are. To do so, NurtureFirst is designing scalable, system-changing solutions that address HBCC provider challenges, and are bringing together thinkers, doers, and activists to catalyze change in the provision of HBCC around the world.
In pursuit of these objectives, NurtureFirst and GDI have spent the last 1.5 years focused on understanding and actioning systems-thinking in home-based childcare. We’re fortunate to have colleagues from governments and civil society organizations across Africa and the world join us on this journey. Collectively, we’ve engaged in both tough conversations about the current state of childcare in low-income countries, as well as inspiring conversations about what solutions truly have the potential to make an impact. A few “aha!” moments from our journey that we are excited to share:
- Governments, businesses, NGOs, and communities are examples of systems that can be influenced for positive change— but what do they all have in common? Simply put, each of these groups are made up of people who make decisions about resources, policies, actions — and ultimately, make decisions about other people. At its core, systems change is really about influencing the mindsets and behaviors of these different groups of people, so that the decisions they make within and across their systems will increasingly prioritize vulnerable populations, such as HBCC providers. The hard part? These groups all have extremely different motivations, capacities, and power. The golden rule for behavior change is that each stakeholder needs to clearly understand the answer to “What’s in it for me?” to even be willing to take the first step. As system-changers, our job is to answer that question for all those different groups, as well as “What WILL be in it for me?” to ensure that the behavior change we are aiming for is sustained. Answering these questions isn’t easy, and takes intentional cross-system consultation, collaboration, and innovation.
- We need to shift the current development approach. Traditionally, an organization receives philanthropic funding, a program is designed, implemented, and monitored; and if successful, the organization sets out to replicate the program in a different community or country. To do so, that organization needs to find more human and financial resources, and then has to go through the whole cycle once again. This approach is time-intensive and ineffective at reaching the entirety of a population. The bottom line is that scaling as one organization is challenging, and even when there is more than one organization working to solve an issue, it often happens in siloes leading to fragmented impact strategies and inefficient resource utilization. This is why a shift from traditional development to system change is imperative. Instead of constantly adding more development programs into the mix, it’s important to recognize the intertwined system of institutions, programs, and funding that already exists. We must find ways to leverage what is already happening, for both scale and sustainability, to create impact that outlives our direct involvement.
- The first principle in using a systems-thinking approach to design impact initiatives is to begin with the end goal in mind. How will we know if the initiative will be successful in 5 years, 10 years, or 100 years? Have we demonstrated significant, large-scale impact to persuade the government to adopt our program? Have NGOs and businesses replicated our approach to impact because we supported them with implementation while codifying, contextualizing, and sharing our learnings? There is no one answer; in fact, there are likely many. But brainstorming various ‘endgames’ early on helps us narrow in on who to engage, when, and how — with the goal of designing initiatives that eventually make us obsolete. During the design phase of NurtureFirst, we identified various sectors and institutions related to home-based childcare (such as health, education, social protection, agriculture, and gender) and analyzed each of their challenges, roles, motivations, interdependencies, and power dynamics. This gave us a holistic view of the existing system that we needed to influence to work in our favor, as well as a better sense of which players we needed to bring along on our journey to effectively reach our endgame (in our case, these players were local Community Based Organizations, the National Government of Kenya, and local county government ministries).
Collaborating with global and local partners in the launch of NurtureFirst has allowed us to test our strategy with the brightest minds in childcare, highlighted the lived experiences of thousands of caregivers, and encouraged us to critically think and act in ways that are sustainable, localized, collaborative, and most importantly, centered around the agency of HBCC providers.
So what’s next for NurtureFirst? We are in the midst of piloting learning interventions in Kisumu, Mombasa, and Murang’a counties in Kenya, and are continuously analyzing how our interventions are improving the ecosystem for HBCC providers. We are ready to spark change, and we eagerly invite you all to join us on our journey. To share your ideas and feedback, please email us at general@nuturefirst.org.
