Summer Archives

Sophia Premji Nairobi, Kenya - Kidogo Early Years

All Great Things Start Kidogo

In Swahili, the word “Kidogo” means “small.” All great things start small. This phrase was truly the motto of my summer project. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to complete my summer project with an early childhood development startup organization called Kidogo Early Years in Nairobi, Kenya. I have no background at all in early childhood education. However, this organization sparked my interest because of its nature as a startup and its relation to my own family heritage.

The mission of Kidogo Early Years is to provide quality education at a low cost to children living in the slums of Nairobi between the ages of 6 months – 6 years. Kidogo provides education to approximately 200 children living in Nairobi at the cost of 80 KES (80 cents) per day. What really drew my interest to this organization is their use of the innovative hub-and-spokes franchising model. Kidogo has two hub centers, located in the slums of Kibera and Kangemi. These centers serve as model centers and they reach more children by franchising their program through mothers who run baby care centers out of their homes. Kidogo provides the same training and materials to support these mothers in caring for children without having all of the overhead costs associated with opening a new center.

As an economics major, I found this model to be quite fascinating and innovative. For my project for Kidogo, I completed a comparative analysis of Kidogo’s model against two other non-profit organizations that also bring early childhood development services to children living in the slums. I interviewed Kidogo and other organizations to fully understand all of their costs. I was looking to find a couple of metrics for each organization: cost/child and cost/center. This bottom line figure would help to determine how cost-efficiently each organization is running their program.

Once I collected the data, I worked for several weeks on building a robust Excel model. This model was used to estimate the current cost/child and cost/center, but also to estimate what those costs would be going forward if the organizations chose to scale-up to 50, 100, or 200 centers. While the task of calculating costs may sound simple, I faced two main challenges. The first involves the lack of record-keeping, which made the task that I was asked to do nearly impossible. The second major challenge I faced were the cultural barriers in relation to communication issues.

Despite these challenges, I successfully built deeper understanding about myself, my heritage, and the start-up world. I applied skills that I learned in the classroom and explored a potential career opportunity. I learned what it means to be a self-starter and how to be a thinker rather than a doer. Although the work I did might have just been a small portion of what this organization needs, the most important thing that I have learned this summer is that all great things start Kidogo.

For more, please visit Kidogo Early Years.