Day care center - Tips to Make Money in Nigeria

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Posted by Felix Okoli on Monday September 17, 2012 at 11:29:46:

Day care centers have been around for a while and they are good businesses you can start up in Nigeria if you have an accommodation for it. It is more like baby sitting children just before they are ready for nursery and primary school.

Day care business is about keeping children comfortable while their parents go to work or just take time off. Businesses related to babies like day care is booming in Africa's most populous country especially where there are no plans to control population yet.

Things you will need
- Energetic and children friendly staff
- Company registration
- Space
- Capital
- Marketing
- Corporate bank account
- Operational rules
- Playground
- Sleeping facility
- Schedule of daily activities
- Insurance

Environment:
The children are your main assets and you would need to ensure that they are protected within a secure and harmless environment. They would tend to spend more time indoors than outdoors so the room where they would stay should be safe and properly ventilated.

Pickups and drop off:
Make sure you have an arrangement of how the kids would be dropped off or picked up by their parents or guardian and ensure that it is part of a written agreement in order to avoid legal actions in cases of missing kids or kidnapping. Only the registered guardians should be allowed to pick-up the child.

Feeding
There may be provision for feeding the child or you may as well agree with parents that they should feed their own kids by also dropping their feeding boxes when leaving their kids. There are day centers where children are fed at least once a day on snacks but parents may also be allowed to drop their feeding boxes. In situation where you feed the kids, you also need to know if there are any food allergies in any of the enrolled kids.

Spacing
One thing to note about spacing is that the more space you have, the more children you can accommodate and the more income you'll get. You should note that there are spacing requirements per child and you should even build that into your business model. Children would need to be evenly spaced out within your structure.

Play ground
This may be available if you have more land space and it helps in de-stressing the kids after being indoor for too long. It may not have complex or highly mobile playing tools but ones suitable for crawling and barely walking kids. The ground should be soft, clean and have open skies.

Market Location
It is much better to target your market for urban areas or just places with lots of kids but whose parents are mostly out working. It is more profitable to open one in the cities rather than rural areas. It is however better to situate your school or center in a quiet environment rather than a noisy one.

Staff training
Your staff may not necessarily be qualified teachers but they should be at least trained on child care and be intelligent. There should be a program for training new staff before assigning them to child care.

Room or rooms
Do you need a single room or many rooms for a child care center? It really depends on your organisational structure and program. You can decide to use a single room in order to centralize your operations and devote your assets to it. However as more kids get enrolled, there is always a limit to the number of kids you can have per room and you would need to expand and then delegate child care staff to other rooms. However the latter decision to decentralize can minimize your efficiency for supervision.

First aid training
You may not have to treat any child if they fall sick but that is the duty of their guardian and you can only help them give medicine to their kids when they are under treatment. You would however need your staff to get trained on first aid treatments in cases of health issues like injuries, break out fevers, breathing problems and so on. You should however report to the parents of any first aid treatment given to their kids.

How much to charge?
It really depends on how much others in your industry are charging and you can do a survey on that. You could charge fees per month, per quarter or bi-annually. Some places charge as much as N20,000 per month and it is just for a 6 to 8 hr child care.

Useful facilities
As a place where kids are meant to stay entertained, cared for and learn the rudiments of life, you would need to make the environment homely for them and hence you can make use of the following facilities:

- Television
- Games
- Teaching
- Sleeping

I hope these few tips have been useful.

Comments:

Re: Day care center

These tips have really been very helpful. God bless you.

Comments:

Re: Day care center Reply by Jecinta on Tuesday May 26, 2015 at 8:49:47:

I run a day care centre and school. though I just started. All u said r correct. my challenge now is to get money for a bigger space. tnx

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