Gwiji Cleaning Services

Area of Focus:

Raise Living Standards

Geography:

Kenya

Gwiji is a tech-based social enterprise which economically empowers women from urban informal settlements working as casual cleaners.

Low-income women from urban informal settlements are a marginalised demographic who often struggle to provide for their children. As many as 800,000 of these women in Nairobi lack access to formal employment and rely on casual cleaning as their main source of income. However, their biggest challenge is finding clients for their services, where they spend up to seven hours each day going door to door, looking for cleaning work.

Gwiji supports these women through digital literacy education, domestic work skills training, and access to economic opportunities through its mobile app platform. The app is helping women earn a steady income from their trade by enabling them to receive cleaning orders direct to their phones, in the comfort of their homes. Currently, Gwiji’s cleaners complete 1-2 cleaning gigs a day, raising their average income from less than $2 to $8 per day, and positively impacting the lives of over 1,000 low-income women.

TRANSFORM will help Gwiji to test new customer acquisition strategies and service offerings within the cleaning industry. With this support, Gwiji aims to expand its impact to 5,000 women and increase their average income to $15 per day. An increase in earnings will ensure these women can keep their children in school and provide for their other basic needs.