Julia Anyango, 31, lost her domestic worker job when her foreign employers moved back from Kenya to their home country in December last year. Knocked off her feet by the abrupt unemployment and without any savings, Ms. Anyango’s life hit rock bottom. But being a single parent of three children in the low-income residential area of Kawangware, in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, there was no time for a pity party.
She immediately looked for another job and quickly got a cleaning position at a Chinese restaurant in the Yaya Centre mall. But business was slow as a result of Covid-19, and the restaurant’s owner was struggling to keep the doors open, so he closed it, and Ms. Anyango lost her job once again.
The thought of her children going to bed hungry at night nagged her. Determined to provide for them, she decided to open a business of her own — a tailoring and hairdressing salon. She had learnt the basic skills from a beauty and tailoring course she took 16 years earlier after she dropped out of school when she was 10 years old. Her mother had enrolled her for the training.
“I worked for the Chinese restaurant for four months, and each month, I spent part of my salary purchasing salon equipment,” she says.“I had to sell the hair dryer, electric shaver, and sewing machine I had bought to raise the 15,000 Kenyan shillings (USD 189) that was required as a deposit for the salon,” she recalls. Ms. Anyango finally opened her business last February. She uses a sewing machine she borrowed from a friend for her tailoring business, while the salon work is predominantly plaiting of hair.
For now, the 3,000-shilling (USD 28) profit she makes each month is thinly spread out to meet her housing and food expenses. But although she struggles to buy fabric and new equipment for the salon, she is hopeful things will look up in due time.
Ms. Anyango’s resilience has earned her a place in a post-Covid-19 recovery initiative for female domestic workers in Kenya. She is one of the 60 women who are benefiting from the project called Inua Mama Fua (‘Lift up the cleaning lady’ in Swahili), launched in April 2020 by the Dhobi Women Network, an organisation whose work is devoted to empowering female domestic workers in the Eastern-African country.
According to the United Nations, there are approximately 67 million domestic workers worldwide, the vast majority of whom are women and often work off the books. While trying to maintain their livelihoods, the lack of access to social protection systems has made them particularly vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Under the initiative’s umbrella, these women, who live in Nairobi’s low-income areas, can access loans of up to 15,000 shillings to boost their businesses or to start new ones.
In order to have access to these loans, however, they have to be part of a table banking group —a group-based funding system where members make weekly savings to form a kitty from which they can later borrow—, a strategy that installs the culture of savings and ensures they have a sustainable capital stream.
Grace Ngugi, executive director of the Dhobi Women Network, says the women will receive the loans with a refund interest of 2.5%, out of which 1% is reinvested into their table banking groups and 1.5% covers administration costs. Domestic workers are a key portion of the Kenyan informal economic sector, in which 767,900 new jobs were created in 2019, according to a 2020 economic survey conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
“Women are the backbone of this country’s economy. When they lose their jobs, their families suffer,” says Ms. Ngugi. The Inua Mama Fua project, which won the 2021 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Legacy Prize awarded by the World Justice Project, has been lauded as exemplary for its fight against inequality and gender-based discrimination.
Like Ms. Anyango, Rose Nyangiza was also able to turn her life around thanks to this initiative. The 47-year-old created her own micro-business selling assorted merchandise like candy and facemasks after giving up having a “mama fua” job that had turned out to be exploitative.
“I worked in a hardware store, which closed in April last year. So, I started doing casual cleaning jobs to raise an income to feed my three children,” she says. She could do a job worth 250 shillings but ended up being paid 150 shillings instead or, worse, not being paid at all. “Some would pay me three to four days later and, at the time [in the midst of the pandemic], the jobs were rarely coming by. If I was lucky, I would work twice a week,” she says.
She gave up on the “mama fua” job 17 months later and started hawking sweets. She spent 800 shillings to buy three packets of candy. Although she made a 150-shilling profit from each packet, it was a risky and tiresome business. “I told myself I needed to get sufficient stock to afford a place from where I could sell,” she says.
With that in mind, she joined a table banking group where she saved 50 shillings per week. From it, she later got a first loan (1,200 shillings), which she used to buy more candy packets and a dozen of socks.
Her business has since grown to a stock worth more than 6,000 shillings, with merchandise including a variety of sweets, biscuits, and face masks. She now sells them from her open stall on the street of the commercial Paramount Plaza building in Ngara, one of Nairobi’s districts well known for its informal market.