As many of you know, I am part of a facebook group of Nairobi moms (called mums here, and don’t you forget it.) Occasionally, someone will post something to the group that really riles up the crowd and there will be lots and lots of comments flowing from it. Once such comment was made last night.
To “translate”, the woman above, Sherry, is asking if it is really possible that nannies get paid between $360-$580 USD per month. She is obviously incredulous. She clearly has NO IDEA how much childcare costs in the US. For the record, at the highest, we’ve paid upwards of $1200 USD per month for full time care in CO and that did not include evenings, weekends, date nights, or sick days for only ONE child. (We only sustained that expense for one month.) I know friends who have paid much more than that in higher end markets.
But what interests me is that following Sherry’s remark was a fairly honest disclosure from these (mostly) Kenyan mums about paying their domestic helpers. Many women “liked” a commenter who said that it was true that people get paid terrible amounts (2, 3, 4K) but that it depends on how much the family has to pay the worker. One woman owned up to paying her nanny 37K ($430 USD). Many others felt like if you pay your nanny more, then you can depend on them to do more tasks. Yet others warned that paying your nanny really does not correlate to how well they take care of your kids. Maintaining a respectful relationship is the only way to ensure good workers.
None of the comments made were anything new to me. But what did interest me was that it became clear that there are two markets out there for domestic workers. There are those who work for “peanuts,” as it was mentioned by the commenters, and there are those who work for wages that might be acceptable. If you were one of those workers in the “peanuts” category, you might not even know that there was another market out there or how to break into it.
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