With both of her parents being employed, there is no one at home to look after little Tasfia.
Shahida Akhter and her husband had taken the decision in November 2019 to enrol their daughter at a childcare centre to ensure essential care needed for their child's development. Unfortunately, a few months later the service closed down indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the pandemic-induced lockdown, Shahida was able to take care of Tasfia while working from home. But she had to seek the services of the daycare once again when offices resumed in-person work.
Another challenge arose for Shahida when she found that the childcare centre had permanently closed its operations after incurring a severe loss amid the lockdown. Shahida now has to take Tasfia to her sister’s home every working day before going to work.
"We have to keep doing this until we can find a good daycare for Tasfia," said Shahida.
The centre where Tasfia was enrolled is not the only one hurt by the pandemic.
Despite many parents needing to keep their children at daycares, temporary shutdowns had badly affected most such facilities, with many being forced to close operations for good as rent and other expenses piled up over the last two years.
Staying afloat a tough ask
A childcare centre is a place where children get care and support needed to grow according to their age. “With more and more women going to work, daycares have become essential for many in the cities. People’s perception of this sector is improving gradually, but that was not the case five or seven years ago,” said Dalia Rodrigues, principal of DC Childcare and Education Centre in Dhaka.
The facility, operating under the Christian Cooperative Credit Union, is a place where parents can leave their children without a worry.
Launched in 2017, it started getting mostly positive responses just as the pandemic was around the corner. “The pandemic has halted our progress. One of the primary aspects of this sector is the services being provided physically, so we had to stop providing our services. But then, why would people enrol their children here?” said Dalia.
The centres struggled to pay their staffs’ salaries, rents and other bills due to the temporary shutdowns. Small enterprises, such as ChildCheer, were the worst sufferers, while the daycares that had been supported by their parents or other organizations, like DC Childcare and The Little Ducklings, somehow managed to hang in there.
After starting operations in 2019, The Little Ducklings received positive feedback from parents within the first six months. It had to suspend its childcare and pre-school facilities fully due to the pandemic, before resuming operations towards the end of 2020 for the children of emergency service providers.
Many parents involved in emergency services, such as doctors, bankers and police, had urged them to reopen to support them during office hours.
“I had no other option than to keep my children in daycare. There is no one at home to look after my children while my husband and I are at work. So I requested the centre to look after my children,” said Sumaya Amin.
Costs pile up, assets become liabilities
A number of daycares reopened on a limited scale—with a few children and by maintaining hygiene rules—in August 2020.
“In the last three months we have made a turnaround in terms of profit. But the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is creating such a situation where we are once again on the verge of going back to zero,” said Farhana Rashid of ChildCheer, a daycare working on early childhood development of children ages 6 months to 8 years, with different curricula for children of different age groups.
Many daycares have pre-school systems. Pre-schools not only educate children at an early age but also help the institutions financially.
“Parents prefer to send their children where they will get an environment conducive to having age-appropriate mental growth through playful learning when both parents are working,” said Samiya Tasmeen, program manager of The Little Ducklings - Daycare, Preschool and Playzone, an initiative of Dhaka Ahsania Mission.
“Daycare is not profitable in Bangladesh and the pandemic has made the situation worse. Most of the revenue comes from schooling and pre-schooling … Everything has come to a halt due to the ongoing surge in Covid-19 cases,” added Samiya.
According to daycare officials, a proper and structured childcare centre requires a sizable investment as it is tough to carry on when the number of enrolments declines rapidly—which has happened amid the pandemic.
Many daycares have had to permanently shut up shop due to a lack of children. One such daycare is HAtS Daycare in Uttara. It had been Atika Moonmoon’s dream to build a safe haven for children, leading to HAtS Daycare’s birth in 2016.
She had kept the space till last June, forking out Tk1.75 lakh per month with plans to reopen if the situation allowed. However, the emergence of different coronavirus variants as well as spikes in infections and deaths made it impossible for her to follow through.
“There is no possibility of reponing HAtS. Besides, the furniture and other items have become a liability since no one is willing to buy them considering the current pandemic situation,” said Atika.
There are around a thousand commercial daycares in Dhaka. The city is also home to 43 public childcare centres. The government has another 20 such establishments across the country.
