Market baseline / No standards of care
No systematic regulation of informal daycares, despite making up 83% of all child-facing institutions in the slums
Incentives for the private sector to self-uplift and regulate urgently needed
Tiny Totos look at this picture
……and see incentive opportunities
What others do
Focus on child care skills, but fail to address need for business sustainability
Enable subsidized operations, undermine client willingness to pay
Daycares can’t survive without subsidy; owners disempowered
Becomes another in a litany of well-meaning charitable interventions
Not sustainable without repeated influx of grant capital
What Tiny Totos does
Focus on owner’s self-interest to earn more from their business
Provide no operating subsidy, but the tools and capital needed for business success
Owners realize improved standards of service directly leads to improved revenues
Growing network of self-sustaining businesses enjoying economies of scale
Replicable business that can become self-sustaining
How we upgrade daycares
Peer learning & networking
We create a network that entrepreneurs can belong to, rely on and learn from
Facilities improvement
We provide design support and capital to improve existing facilities (e.g. air, use of space, lighting)
Management and leadership
We teach owners how to visualize their growth and leadership potential
Data collection
We teach managers to collect client details, payment practices, child attendance, health and nutrition
Early childhood development
We teach best practices to foster child wellbeing in - nutrition, health, stimulation
Business Training
We train owners in book keeping to marketing, strategy and pricing, recordkeeping, marketing
Technology
We help managers use phone-based apps to record income, communicate with clients, and track own business performance
Enhancing daycare network value
We see daycares as social influencers, local from which more value, products and services for clients and the informal economy can be built
We recognize that without improved well-being at home, children in daycares will still languish and suffer
We also realized that for Tiny Totos to be sustainable, we needed to generate additional value from the daycares and network
From 2016, we began to provide business loans to entrepreneurs with a proven revenue track record to help them enhance their operations
In 2017 we launched a pilot asset finance scheme open only to best paying clients, allowing them buy products that
oEnhance health and wellbeing of children
oSave money on basic goods
We finance clean coostoves, LPG stoves, water filters and pressure cookers, smart phones and business improvement loans. We currently have 55+ loans issued; with 2% in arrears on business loans, 4% on product loans.
These positive results suggest our KYC / client credit screen can derisk the sale of livelihood enhancing products to a circle of trusted partners and clients, while generating revenue to meet Tiny Totos’ operational costs.
Mapping the Market
Tiny Totos has created an online map identifying the location of over 500 of the estimated 3,500 daycares in Nairobi
As we enter 2019 we are investing heavily in our phone-based app reporting system. We intend to integrate these platforms over time, so that the Tiny Totos map can become a live information resource for any prospective client, daycare manager, regulator, private sector partner or researcher keen to understand market scope, standards, resources and client activity pf the daycare slum grassroots economy.