From Care to Change: How Mobile Creches Builds a Systems Approach to Early Childhood Development 

By Shweta Yadav, Deputy Manager, Monitoring Evaluation Accountability Learning at Mobile Creches

August 12, 2025 – Amidst the dust and din of India’s construction sites, a silent revolution began. For over five decades, Mobile Creches (MC) has been working to change an image that is far too common: a child with no safe space while their mother works.

What started as an emergency response—creating havens for children—has grown into a powerful movement. Today, MC is rebuilding how India thinks about childcare: not as a private family issue, but as a shared societal responsibility.

From Service to System: Building an Ecosystem of Care 

Mobile Creches learned early that a creche by itself can only go so far. A creche without a trained caregiver is just a room. A caregiver without community trust is a stranger. A program without data is invisible to policymakers. And policies without implementation are just paperwork. 

So, MC began to knit the strands together—child by child, center by center, policy by policy. 

At the heart of this evolution lies systems thinking: the belief that for children to truly thrive, the entire environment around them must shift—and shift together. 

What’s unique is how MC customizes its models—whether it’s a makeshift center at a construction site, a slum-based creche, or a community-run center in tea gardens. These are not cookie-cutter solutions but contextualized responses to real needs. 

With a presence across 12 states, MC’s strength lies in adapting to the diversity of  India’s geographies, while never compromising on the core promise: every child deserves a safe, caring, and learning-rich environment. 

Spanning 15 states through three programmatic tracks—Child Care Centres, Parenting Programme, and Community Engagement Programme—MC has touched the lives of over 4 million children and supported the establishment of 5,000 childcare centers. But its true impact lies beyond numbers—in people. 

Mobile Creches has deeply invested in people, training thousands of women from marginalized communities to become not just care workers but champions of early childhood development. These women weren’t outsiders parachuted in. They were mothers, neighbors, and survivors who spoke the same language and carried the same burdens. When they stood in front of other parents to talk about nutrition or stimulation, they weren’t preaching. They were sharing.

Shifting Norms: From Mothers to Communities 

As trust grew, so did the space for conversation.  

Fathers started showing up to “Dulaar Parvarish” sessions, learning to play, speak, and bond with their children, breaking deep-rooted gender norms. Families that once viewed childcare as “women’s work” began to see it as everyone’s work.  

This shift didn’t happen overnight. It was seeded in relationships and nurtured through sustained community engagement. And as these shifts took root, families, communities, and even local employers began to see care not as a burden, but as an enabler of dignity, productivity, and equity. 

Each cog in the system—a trained worker, an aware father, a supportive employer, a responsive government department—contributes to turning the wheel of change. 

From Homes to Halls of Power: Integrating Childcare into Government Action 

As the grassroots ecosystem matured, MC began to look upward—to the halls of local government and state administration. Here too, the goal wasn’t to build new structures, but to strengthen and reorient the ones that already existed. 

MC collaborated with panchayats, municipal bodies, and state departments—not by dictating, but by co-creating solutions. In Haryana, they supported the development of a creche policy that aligned with on-the-ground realities. In Assam, MC worked alongside the Department of Women and Child Development to strengthen early childhood services in informal settlements. In Karnataka, it partnered with rural development ministries to extend reach into underserved areas. 

These weren’t isolated pilot projects. They were part of a deliberate design—a loop between field insights and policy action, where one constantly informed and strengthened the other. 

Every training session for a government worker drew on lessons from the field. Every policy brief MC contributed to was backed by real-time data from their monitoring systems. In this way, the personal—a child’s first scribble, a mother’s testimony, a creche worker’s observation—became political. It became evidence, used to advocate for broader, more inclusive systems of care.

Data as a Bridge: Turning Insights into Systemic Action 

Information is power, but only when it’s usable. MC has developed a robust Monitoring Information System (MIS) that does more than record attendance—it captures growth, nutrition, and well-being. 

This data allows MC to track not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening and how to course correct. It enables them to go back to a center where attendance has dropped and discover that a nearby water source has dried up, pushing families to migrate. It helps them tailor training based on where children are falling behind—be it language, motor skills, or emotion regulation. And this evidence doesn’t stay locked in spreadsheets. MC shares it with state actors, contributes to national dialogues like Poshan Maah (the Nutrition Month supported by the government and held in September every year), participates in global platforms like UN Women and G20, and uses it to call for investment in care as a foundational pillar of development.

Adapting for Tomorrow: Innovation Rooted in Reality 

As the world around us changes—with rising climate shocks, forced migration, and increasing informalization of work—MC continues to adapt its systems approach to remain resilient. 

It now trains civil society organizations to replicate the care model in their own geographies. It supports the establishment of community-owned centers that are low-cost, sustainable, and context-specific—because care must not collapse when systems are strained.  

The Way Forward: Care as the Backbone of Development 

In Mobile Creches’ world, a creche is not a building. It is a nerve center—where health, learning, gender equity, employment, and dignity all converge. 

The transformation of a toddler from wandering near construction debris to laughing and playing in a safe space while her mother works with confidence and her father feeds her is not just a heart-warming story. It’s a systemic shift. 

It reminds us that childcare is not a service. It is infrastructure. It is economy. It is justice. 

To scale this vision, we need convergence. Governments, the private sector, funders, and civil society must come together, not to plug gaps, but to reimagine systems where care is embedded, not outsourced; where families are supported, not stretched thin; where care is an investment, not an afterthought; and where every child, regardless of where they are born, gets the start they deserve.