Tiny Totos — Strengthening Community Childcare
Generating evidence on the Tiny Totos Care Model, a social franchise that delivers affordable, quality childcare while sustaining small-scale daycare providers as viable businesses.
In Nairobi's informal settlements, inadequate access to affordable and reliable childcare continues to limit women's participation in the labour market and reinforces the unequal burden of unpaid care work. For low-income families, the lack of trusted childcare options constrains economic choices, while policymakers face persistent gaps in evidence on scalable approaches that improve service quality and sustain livelihoods within the care economy.
In 2025, Population Council Kenya partnered with Tiny Totos and the Consortium for Women Empowerment (COWE) to strengthen and generate evidence on the Tiny Totos Care Model (TTCM), a social franchise approach that delivers affordable, quality childcare while supporting small-scale daycare providers, including expanded use of digital platforms for provider training and engagement.
Strengthen consistency and quality of childcare services delivered through the TTCM social franchise model. Invest in provider capacity, continuous learning, and digital platforms for training and engagement. Generate evidence to inform Kenya's National Care Policy and support scale-up of quality childcare.
Our approach
The partnership strengthened implementation quality across TTCM daycare centres while studying what drives uptake and economic viability, pairing this with a concurrent cost-effectiveness study to build the case for scale-up.
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