By Austin Merrill for Vanity Fair
Down in the charcoal smoke and congestion of Africa’s largest slum, there is a place where all you can hear is children laughing and singing, where the walls are brightly colored paintings of animals and alphabet lessons, where mealtimes smell of warm stews and fresh fruit, and where little smiles light up the room. This place is called Kidogo, a childcare and education center in the heart of Kibera, just southwest of downtown Nairobi, Kenya. It is both a vast improvement over the dire facilities it was built to replace and a hopeful glimpse into the future of development work in Africa—where handouts have a deep past and little progress to show for it.
Kidogo is one of 18 start-ups chosen for the first phase of Spring, a small-business accelerator launched this summer in Nairobi for companies operating in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.
[…] Kidogo was born out of a visit that Sabrina Premji made to a childcare center in December of 2011. Premji is a native of Toronto who had been drawn to East Africa because her parents immigrated to Canada from Tanzania. She was in Nairobi to work on projects related to maternal and child health, and was taken to a day care on the edge of Nairobi by a colleague. “As soon as I walked in the door, the smell of urine and feces was overwhelming,” she says. The room was dark, and soon Premji’s foot hit a baby. Horrified that she’d nearly tripped over a child, she bent down to pick it up. “And all of a sudden I saw babies all around me. Twenty, maybe twenty-five children—all awake, but in complete silence. It was the most eerie thing I’ve ever experienced.”
[…] After visiting the childcare center Premji broke down in tears. She called a friend—Afzal Habib, a fellow Canadian who also has a parent from Tanzania—and together they began to map out the business plan that would become Kidogo. “We realized that if this was a problem in that slum, it was probably a problem in many of the slums in Kenya and many of the slums in East Africa,” Premji says. “The thing that did it for us was the realization that that could have been us. We grew up knowing we could do anything we wanted. But if our parents hadn’t moved and we’d been born in Tanzania, we could have easily been one of the children I came across. So then it was, ‘We’ve got to do something.’”
More at the Source: An Accelerator That Believes Businesses and Girls Are the Keys to Afri | Vanity Fair
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