SIPA Emerging Leader Award: Sabrina Habib MPA-DP ’16

Sabrina Habib is the Cofounder and Chief Exploration Officer at Kidogo, the leading childcare network in Kenya. 

Kidogo improves access to quality, affordable childcare for low-income families by equipping women ("Mamapreneurs”) to run sustainable childcare micro-businesses. Prior to Kidogo, Sabrina worked with the Aga Khan Development Network in East Africa, where she first encountered the childcare crisis in Nairobi's informal settlements. Dissatisfied with the status quo and traditional approaches to development, Sabrina co-founded Kidogo in 2014 as a scalable non-profit social enterprise. Under her leadership, Kidogo has become Kenya’s largest childcare network, providing 50,000+ children with the care needed for healthy development while enabling mothers to work with peace of mind. Sabrina was recently selected by Melinda French Gates as one of 12 global leaders – including former prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Olympian Allyson Felix and film-maker Ava DuVernay – to allocate $20M to organizations improving women’s health globally. Her work with Kidogo has been recognized by The Economist, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Vanity Fair, Forbes, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy.

TRANSCRIPT: 

SABRINA HABIB: When I reflect on my life, I never thought I would be working in childcare. And yet here I am, running the largest childcare network in Kenya. SIPA is a huge part of that story.

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If you want communities that are thriving, economies, countries, regions, you need to start by investing in the smallest and the littlest. Research shows us that 90% of brain development happens in a child's first five years. And yet, in 2011, I went out to a daycare center just outside of Nairobi, Kenya.

I saw babies all around me. The smell was awful, and it was completely dark. And I learned that this was the best childcare option for working moms living in the informal settlements. And I left that experience overwhelmed with emotion.

And I think that was such a big ah-ha moment for me, which was, there's something fundamentally wrong in this development sector. We exist in silos of health, and education, and infrastructure, and water. And yet people's needs and their lives transcend those silos. I saw the problems but didn't know what to do about it. I really wanted to make a difference.

I needed more, and started to look at master's programs to figure out who could teach me. And then I came across the Masters In Development Practice. And when I read that brochure, it's like the program was written for me.

My SIPA experience didn't happen in a traditional way. I was learning in real time these best practices in the development sector. And I was able to apply it directly to this organization that I was building. We started to find our first center, we hired our first staff, and the first day of class was also my first day of class at Columbia.

At Kidogo, The First thing you'll notice is the sound. Sounds of kids laughing, and playing, and singing, and crying, and really express themselves in their fullest version, so that they feel safe. It's not just about the children, it's about women. It's first about mothers making sure that they've got the peace of mind to be able to work. But it's also about these women entrepreneurs.

Rather than starting our own centers, we work with this existing infrastructure of women who are already running childcare centers, providing them just that little bit of a lift up to running thriving childcare care microbusinesses that can last without any type of funding.

SIPA gave me an orientation of how to approach development work, multi-sectoral approaches, figuring out root causes, embracing the complexity. All of those are how I approach my work at Kidogo, and how I will continue to be as a social entrepreneur, and as a development practitioner.

I think what made me start this work is different than what has made me continue this work. I'm a mom now. I can only work because my daughter is in a safe childcare space. When you approach the work with curiosity, and with generosity, and openness, and you surround yourself with really good people, you find ways to make an impact at bigger and bigger levels.

In this moment, there are more than 50,000 children who are receiving a safe start to life. And yet there is so much more work to be done. The problem is too big for us to play small. We're here to inform the policies, the legislations, the financing required to ensure that every kid in Kenya who needs childcare can have access to it.

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