“By Crawling a Child Learns to Stand”. In Conversation With Guinean Social Entrepreneur Providing Innovative Childcare Solutions.

‘African women need to develop greater confidence in communicating their needs to stakeholders at home, work or in the wider community’. This is a sentiment that has featured in our conversations at Grace, our ecosystem for female African changemakers. Various studies have captured the significant time spent on “household time overheads” by African women (e.g., preparing meals, fetching water, washing clothes, gathering fuel for cooking[1]). Demands on time are extraordinary. Recognising and responding to them presents opportunity for impact and commercial return. 

The need for female-centric solutions to ease some of these pressures has been well understood by Guinean social entrepreneur, Kadiatou Segaud. She is the founder of K Concept, a company which she describes as, “a training centre which is contributing to the fight against unemployment, which is over 60% in Guinea”. The company provides continuous training and monitoring and evaluation of nannies and teachers that it places into families and creches, because Kadiatou sees just how fundamental the role of a nanny is, not only in the lives of the children but also in the lives of the mothers, who can have peace of mind to concentrate on their careers. Yet she feels that it is a profession which is “under-valued in Guinea”, a country which ranks 125 out of 153 in the World Bank’s Global Gender Gap rankings[2].

In addition, K-Concept has tapped into a much-needed, niche area of business support services for SMEs, in the provision of training in banking, insurance, account management among others which is a huge opportunity for Guinea, where there is a high degree of informality, where entrepreneurs are constrained financially and are unexposed to continuous business support. Though the extractives sector has accounted for the country’s high per capita GDP growth rates in recent years[3], Guinea is still a low-income country and the ravages of the Ebola crisis of 2014-2015 are still evident, which Kadiatou describes as the “lost years”. 

Our conversation with Kadiatou was illuminating. Here are three key takeaways we gleaned, from a diaspora, local knowledge and social entrepreneurship perspective:

1.    Return migration fuels fresh innovation

Even though Guinea does not have a strongly-articulated diaspora engagement policy, that has not stopped companies like K Concept emerging, whose founder was inspired by ideas developed in her country of adoption, France, and tailored to the local needs back home.  Kadiatou spent close to a decade in banking and insurance in France, where she “had the opportunity to watch the professionals”. Inspired not only by the fact that “the bank was a bank that was tailored to the people”, Kadiatou also took note of the way the bank valued the role of women by providing a creche at the workplace. This was in contrast to what she knew of her homeland Guinea, where she felt that there “was a lack of competency around looking after children”.

2.    Social enterprises understand local idiosyncrasies

Social enterprises are, by definition, companies set up first and foremost to respond to a social or environmental need. That necessitates understanding the local context extremely well. As the ageing population in Africa evolves rapidly, with the WHO projecting an elderly population increase from 43 million in 2010 to 67 million by 2025 and 163 million by 2050, Kadiatou believes that the traditional roles that grandparents once played in the lives of their children and grandchildren are also rapidly changing in Guinea. “The grandparents of today aren’t the same as those of before. Nowadays, grandparents aren’t solely focused on looking after their grandchildren. They now have their own lives, largely because their children may have moved away from the places where they grew up, so women of today are now forced to look for alternative forms of childcare cover”. K-Concept is able to respond to these changing dynamics by matching the needs of families with the right calibre of nanny, made possible through the organisation’s strong emphasis on training. 

3.     High levels of training within social enterprises

Our research on the correlation between social entrepreneurship and job creation tells us that there are typically few opportunities for skills development and training within the informal economy, which accounts for an estimated 66% of jobs in Sub Saharan Africa[4]. Even for those who are engaged in the formal economy, only 33% of for-profit businesses provide on the job training, compared with 49% of social enterprises[5].

K-Concept reflects this characteristic of a social enterprise. Indeed, it provides 180 hours of training spread out over eight months for nannies because “young women who want to work in a creche don’t want to go through a process of professionalisation, but for us it’s critical.  We have to ‘reorientate’ their values”. Meanwhile, for teachers, K-Concept provides 35 hours of training in addition to 35 hours of monitoring and evaluation, annually. The organisation sees that this training is essential for providing best practice for teachers and over the long term, it helps to build capacity for managers to run teaching establishments. The train the trainer concept is a powerful one because of the opportunity to transform, generationally. As Kadiatou puts it: “you never know who you’ll be teaching – one day it could be the future president of the republic!” 

We are an Africa focused and African-owned company, working in support of sustainable and transformative outcomes in the region. If you have any questions, please get in touch: impact@songhaiadvisory.com We would love to hear from you!

[1]https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/473591467990333534/gender-time-use-and-poverty-in-sub-saharan-africa

[2]http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf

[3]E.g., 4.5% year-on-year growth between 2012 and 2018

[4]https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/social_enterprise_and_job_creation_in_sub-saharan_africa_final_singlepages.pdf

[5]Ibid.