Description
Universities in both high- and low-resource settings offer on-campus child care to students and/or faculty and staff. For example, the University of California and the University of Michigan (US), the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) all operate on-campus child care and early education centers for students, faculty, and staff. Harvard University (US) is affiliated with independently operated centers on or near its campuses and its student employment office also keeps a list of students willing to provide parents with occasional babysitting services. South Africa’s University of the Western Cape runs an on-campus center for faculty and staff but not for students. The university’s Gender Equity Unit helps students who have children to make informal arrangements such as helping find babysitters.
The services provided by these centers vary, including daycare, extended daycare, backup care, parent education sessions, referral services, and summer camps. Several centers are open year-round except for holidays. Some information was available on the cost of using this service at the University of Cape Town, where fees are determined based on the parents’ joint income and can be paid through payroll deductions or student accounts, as appropriate.
Other types of educational institutions also offer child care. At the middle and secondary school levels, the Programme for Adolescent Mothers in Jamaica and the Diphalana Initiative in Botswana established on-site nurseries to allow student-mothers to attend classes and breastfeed during breaks. The nurseries in the Programme for Adolescent Mothers also worked with young mothers and fathers to teach them good parenting habits. Child care centers operated by community learning centers (CLCs) in Iran and home-based care services offered by CLCs in Vietnam enable parents to participate in classes.
Implementation lessons learned
Program planners should consider implementation research and educational outreach efforts that challenge existing norms and attitudes that are not fully supportive of child care centers. For example, student-mothers in the Diphalana Initiative in Botswana preferred to have their families take care of their children, and according to a 2003 evaluation, none had used the on-site nurseries. In addition, offering child care may be insufficient to transform arrangements if students or faculty are not able to access or afford it. At the University of California, too few child care slots are available to qualifying faculty members who seek them, and available slots are costly. One female assistant professor noted that “the people who are most affected by this are likely to be at the assistant level, earning the least money. Over half of my [pre-tax] salary has gone to preschool in the past two years.”
Examples
University of Cape Town Educare Centre
University of Michigan Early Childhood Education and Care programs
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