A 2026 report by the World University Service of Canada (WUSC) and the Coalition on Violence Against Women (COVAW) has cast a harsh light on Kenya’s paid childcare sector, describing it as a “zone of exploitation” sustained by poor wages, informality and near-total regulatory neglect. Behind the statistics is a workforce that is overwhelmingly female, whose labour quietly enables households, help owners of businesses/corporate workers, and the wider economy to function, even as their own lives remain precarious and stationed.
A fictional story narration of a 29years old woman, who has spent most of her adult life caring for other people’s children, paints a vivid picture of what the childcare work-engagement in Africa entails and how it affects the workers. Her work designation sits at the heart of family life and the urban economy, but for her, it came at the expense of her own safety and future. As a teenager without parents, she was sent from her rural home to Nairobi with assurances that a “good family” would take her in and secure her future through the sponsorship of her education. What awaited her instead was Kenya’s vast, informal domestic work economy, commonly referred to as maid work; where childcare, cooking and cleaning merge into long, undefined days of labour with little pay and no protection.
Her story reflects how family arrangements, culture and poverty intersect and malign young people’s future across Africa. Many rural families that are facing hardship, send their teenage children (mostly the girl-child) to the city to work in a household, which is seen as a survival strategy and as a form of social support. Employers often frame the arrangement as “helping” a young child rather than hiring a worker. Blurring the line between kinship and labour. In practice, this informality strips off the rights of standard professional workers in this field. Often without contracts, clear/defined working hours or oversight, these domestic spaces become workplaces hidden from public scrutiny, over what the subject in question faces.
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