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

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