Kiddocare, Malaysia’s first babysitting mobile platform, today exchanges a Letter of Intent with Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) to pursue development outcomes in child-minding best practices, education and research.
Kiddocare is a tech start-up that’s been largely successful in reimagining the traditional business model of offering babysitting services. By dispensing the service via a mobile app, Kiddocare conveniently links parents with trained, reliable babysitters based on their preferred time and location. The Kiddocarers are third party babysitters onboard the Kiddocare app-based matching platform.
The economics of the platform has also helped many Malaysian women hop on the sharing economy map to supplement their income. Currently, the company is catering to brisk demand for screened and vetted babysitters and will soon offer its services nation-wide.
One key area of interest that both UPM and Kiddocare are hoping to develop in tandem is the capture of more meaningful data to use in improving the teaching and training modules as a means of enhancing best practices in the sector.
The cooperation is a timely measure to keep UPM as a leading research university abreast of a fast-growing new-end market and bring its early childhood education faculty up to date on emerging trends to cater to millennial parents.
Most reflective of the cooperation’s intent relates to improving child-minding development as a whole and joint opportunities for research to explore the great convenience, service quality and time flexibility that the traditional business can now offer. In part, UPM, as a university that constantly pursues quality early childhood education programs aims to embed better practices into its faculty’s future curricular.
Ultimately, leveraging from the academia-private partnership, UPM, in its capacity as the government’s brain trust seeks to gather resources, review and recommendations to facilitate better policy formulation at a larger national level.
In light of the cooperation, Kiddocare’s Chief Executive Officer, Nadira Mohd Yusoff says, “We are to become a strategic partner for UPM. The sharing economy is definitely gaining more attention as most successful companies today are technological platforms. In turn, this can help UPM collect better information and data to formulate better education modules, training programs and improved child-minding services. Because Kiddocare is founded by highly dynamic social entrepreneurs who happen to be working mothers, it is possible to envisage that along with technology, the child-minding industry can play an important role too in improving the wellbeing of Malaysian families”.
