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Traders at Gikomba Market in Nairobi on March 30, 2020. [File, Standard]
Nairobi City County is in the midst of a quiet but significant urban evolution. Over the past year, through a deliberate partnership between the county government and Wow Mom Kenya, the city has begun building something most cities never bother to measure: a clear, data-backed picture of what it actually takes for a woman trader to thrive in Nairobi's markets.
The numbers that came back made the case for us.
A baseline study conducted by Dalberg Research, Wow Mom Kenya and BSD Group, with the support of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) across Nairobi's key market centres, found that the overwhelming majority of women traders, 84 per cent, rely on self-care arrangements for their children, largely because formal childcare remains too expensive or simply unavailable near their place of work.
