Workers in informal employment often lack access to high quality public services, including child care – an issue that disproportionately compromises women’s incomes. In three African cities, Accra, Durban and Kigali, WIEGO worked with worker organizations to develop child care solutions for informally employed women working in markets.
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Head Porters Aisha Adam (left) and Hawa Latif (right) carry goods on their heads in Kantamanto Market. Work as a kayeyei, head load porters, is rife with challenges. Aisha describes the physical challenges of carrying heavy loads, the low pay, the risks of violence and theft. At night, many kayeyei, due to their inability to afford accommodation, sleep outside or in the marketplace, making them a target for thieves who would steal their day's wages. Hawa Latif left her hometown of Tulu, in Ghana's Northern Region, to come to Accra to earn a living working as a kayayei. She quickly got a job working with a cassava and plaintain vendor, and day in and day out, Hawa transports the large loads of products for customers from her madame's shop to the customers' vehicles. It's physically tasking work; Hawa speaks of back aches and waist pains, but she can't take a day off just because she feels sick. Photo by Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images Reportage
Working parents, particularly women, have to earn an income and care for children at the same time. This can mean lost earning opportunities, reduced incomes, and long hours balancing paid and unpaid work. Women in informal employment are disproportionately affected. WIEGO’s research during the COVID-19 pandemic showed women with increased care responsibilities experienced a bigger income drop than men, and took longer to recover their earnings.
Providing child care services in informal workplaces, like markets, is essential to support women in informal employment and families who rely on their earnings. But establishing affordable child care is challenging due to restricted space in crowded trading areas, affordability, and lack of regulation and early childhood development guidelines.
WIEGO’s Social Protection Programme, together with its Accra team, Asiye eTafuleni, and SYTRIECI worked to develop sustainable solutions.
Read about how workers in South Africa, Ghana and Rwanda are developing and implementing child care centers.(this link opens in new window)WIEGO’s child care project was designed to address the specific challenges of each city. Working with its partners, WIEGO developed solutions to improve childcare infrastructure and affordability, established relationships with key stakeholders, and built evidence on child-care provision for market traders and street vendors. The project used a hybrid governance model that ensured participation from parents, workers and government representatives.
WIEGO supported worker organizations to establish child care management committees, made up of a variety of stakeholders from parents to government representatives, helping to ensure stable governance.
A child care centre in Accra’s Makola Market faced challenges arising from tensions between the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the trader organizations running it. Ghana’s election in 2024 compounded the disruption, leading to a change in market leadership.
The child care management committees established in Makola, Dome and Adenta markets strengthened stakeholder buy-in, and helped ensure continuity and resilience for future government transitions.
WIEGO continues to support the committees to implement Ghana’s Early Childhood Care and Development Policy (2025) – a national framework aimed to ensure holistic support for children – and child care guidelines designed for market-based centres.
In Durban, infrastructure solutions for the often-cramped conditions in market areas were developed by Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) with technical and strategic support from WIEGO.
They have implemented two pop-up child-care spaces which conform to health and safety guidelines. The spaces are being used to test the applicability of urban and early childhood development regulations to small, market-based centres. The replicability of the solutions for different contexts is being explored.
The Brookstreet child-care facility has earned Bronze certification — the first level of conditional registration for Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes in South Africa under the national Vangasali (Bana Pele) mass registration drive. WIEGO together with AeT, are now exploring how these solutions can be replicated in other contexts.
WIEGO worked with its partners to secure child care financing, through government subsidies or worker organization-led savings groups.
In Rwanda, WIEGO and its partner SYTRIECI explored linking Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAS) to child care. Under this model, a portion of the interest earned by VSLA members went directly to the home-based child-care facilities where their children were cared for.
More than 500 women across VSLA groups were able to pool resources to fund child care in their communities.
WIEGO worked with its partner SYTRIECI in Rwanda to research how women traders access and afford childcare. The study found that despite Rwanda’s expanding early childhood development infrastructure, there are still significant barriers to accessing it – facilities often too far from markets, opening hours conflicting with trading schedules, and unaffordable fees.
These findings informed advocacy efforts and programme design, giving policymakers and partners practical evidence to make child care genuinely accessible and affordable for women in the informal economy.
