Friendly workplaces for working mothers: Do lactation rooms promote women’s labor force participation, productivity and breastfeeding? And how do we encourage organizations to create them?

Our intervention consists of a bundle of monetary incentives, informational sessions and consensus-building activities within schools to encourage them to create a lactation space and adopt a breastfeeding policy.
We will provide schools with monetary incentives for the specific purpose of creating lactation spaces. These grants will be disbursed only once a detailed proposal to establish a lactation space is submitted, and its feasibility is approved by our implementing partner. Informational sessions entail a one-hour meeting - to which all the school staff is invited - to increase awareness about the law which requires all employers to support working women to breastfeed at work through the arrangement of lactation spaces and creation of breastfeeding policies. The sessions will provide information on the existence of the law to all the participants, along with some practical guidelines that the school can follow to apply it. Finally, to create consensus around the new breastfeeding arrangements, we will create a committee of “champions of breastfeeding-friendly workplaces”. During the all-staff meeting, these “champions” will be given a mandate to push the lactation rooms law within their own organization as a group.


The informational sessions will be delivered by one of our implementing partners, the Kenya Association for Breastfeeding (KAB), which has long-standing expertise on implementing informational campaigns and helping mothers reconcile breastfeeding and work. Specifically, we will hold an all-staff meeting in each school, which will be conducted by KAB members and will consist of three parts:
1) Following some standardized scripts and structure, the KAB team will inform participants about the law, provide suggestions on how to best design lactation rooms, give practical tips on usage for mothers and split the participants into groups for brainstorming about the topic.
2) Moreover, the committee of “champions” will be nominated. This will happen in front of all the attendants during the meeting, so that other employees will be aware of the identity and role of the new champions, and that champions will feel publicly invested in their new responsibilities.
3) Finally, a voucher for 50,000 KSH will be given to the committee as a reminder of the availability of money for the initiative, which they can redeem by submitting a detailed proposal.

We further explore whether the composition of our committees matters by varying whether “champions” are only women or a mixed-gender group.
The exact identity of champions will be determined in the baseline survey, where we will get a list of “potential champions”, who are people deemed by some of their peers to be fit for voicing the employees’ needs and who are available to have this role. We will pick 4 of them to be part of our group of champions and following the specific gender composition of the treatment.

2024-02-05

2024-03-29

We plan to measure the effect of our intervention on schools’ compliance with the lactation spaces law by measuring the establishment of a lactation space and adoption of a lactation policy.

We plan to measure the effect of our intervention on teachers’ outcomes by measuring demand, attitudes, and beliefs about breastfeeding-related and family-friendly workplace policies, work satisfaction, relationship with colleagues, and well-being.

We will measure in the mid to longer term the effect of having established lactation spaces and policies on teachers’ outcome by measuring breastfeeding, work behavior (e.g., absences, working hours, productivity) and turnover.

More details on the exact outcomes and their construction will be registered at a later stage, as they also depend on fundraising.

More specifically, we have a few different ways of measuring the establishment of a space.
1) Decision to establish. This will be measured at the end of August 2024, and can take two forms: schools can either decide to design their own lactation space, or can decide to purchase a mobile unit from our partner NGO. We measure this through the administrative records of our partner NGOs, who ask the schools to fill out forms in either case.
2) Mode of establishment. We will define two separate variables to distinguish between the design of an own lactation space and the decision to purchase a mobile unit from our partner NGO.
3) Effective establishment. This will be measured in endline visits or trough photographic proof of establishment.

All the schools randomized into treatment will get our partner’s information session and committee creation.

We will further randomize two treatments:
Whether schools also get monetary incentives for the creation of a lactation room;
The composition of the committee in charge of making the school a “breastfeeding friendly” workplace. The committee may be made of female employees only or mixed-gender employees, and will exclude the headteachers.

The control group will not get any intervention, only data collection.

Not available

Randomization done in the office using Stata.

Randomization will be at the school level.
Stratification variables will be: subcounty, type of school (primary or secondary, private or public) and whether the school is located close to a kindergarten.

Yes

300 schools

We will survey 10 teachers in each school, for a total of 3,000 teachers. The participants to our intervention are a lot more as the average number of teachers per school is 24. In total, we have a sample of about 7250 teachers.

Control Group: 99 schools
Meeting + Money: 99 schools (of which 51 Female Only and 48 Mixed-Gender Committees)
Meeting Only: 102 schools (of which 52 Female Only and 50 Mixed-Gender Committees)