At The Women’s Bakery, we recognize and value that women wear different hats throughout their lives - employees, daughters, friends, partners, and moms - amongst others. We know the importance of being present in each of these roles and we never want to put a woman in the position of having to choose between these roles, especially when it comes to the workplace and being a mom. As a result, we are committed to changing the workplace for women, by women - namely through our Baby Houses. We are improving our services at our Baby Houses, find out how!
Women around the world are often tasked with the unpaid labor of taking care of their homes and their children on top of any work they do outside of the home. At The Women’s Bakery, we are constantly trying to think of ways to make all these roles work together a little more easily. One of the main barriers that we heard from our team members was that it is especially difficult to find safe, reliable, and affordable childcare. When Yvonne, our Social Impact Manager, heard this and experienced it firsthand she came up with the idea of bringing child care to our bakeries for our team members.
Thus, the idea to create Baby Houses came to life! Over the last two years we have built two Baby Houses. First in Gicumbi and now in Kigali. These Baby Houses serve to provide child care mainly for infants and toddlers that are not old enough to attend school yet. As such, we have not built a Baby House for our Ruyenzi bakery because the children of the team there are already of school age.
Currently, the Baby House in Gicumbi is cared for by two nannies and used by five team members. The Kigali Baby House was constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic so we were not able to formally launch it until health and safety restrictions eased up. But the time has now come to officially open it up for our team, which especially welcomed during this time of heightened bakery production. The baby house in Kigali has two nannies as well and will be filled with babies in the upcoming months!
In preparation for the Kigali Baby House launch and to strengthen the services at our baby house in Gicumbi, we have partnered with Kidogo, an international social enterprise focused on improving access to quality, affordable Early Childhood Care & Education in East Africa's low income communities. Over the course of seven, three-hour long training sessions our team members will be trained on topics such as learning through play, positive discipline, as well as nutrition and WASH.
We are so thankful for the generous support of our donors that helped bring our vision of creating state of the art Baby Houses for our team members in Rwanda. Interested in learning more about what it takes to bring a baby house to life? Reach out to our team today!
