KUCHING, Feb 2: Local housing developers to include nurseries and kindergartens in their future development plans.
The call was made by Women, Family, and Community Development Minister Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah.
She added the purpose of promoting the concept for developers to include the nursery aspect would change the real-estate ecosystem for greater good.
“For those developers, please include in their plans, a suitable place for nurseries and kindergartens because it is a very much needed facility.
“We can’t have such facility to be far away from where their home, or somewhere that is outside of their way of commute,” she said this when met by reporters during a visit to Taska Sedidik in Semariang here today.
As such, this would also be an enabler to retain the women’s workforce and build their career while, relieving parents stress and use the benefit to focus on their work and other well-being.
Fatimah also noted that the pros of having such facilities can easily outweigh the cons whereby, such services are growing in popularity, where children safety, quality care and education are assured.
“For the long run, this is to retain women in the workforce, because a lot of our women are highly educated.”
She further added that the facility would adopted an “Open Door” policy, which is an inclusivity policy implemented with the stipulation that all IPAKK SeDidik accept the admission of children with special needs.
“The door should be open to every child, it does not matter who they are, especially to the children with special needs.
“This will make the children learn how to accept others, accept people’s differences, as we saw earlier in this kindergarten,” she added.
Also present for the visit were Deputy Minister in the Premier’s Department (Law, MA63, State-Federal Relations) Datuk Sharifah Hasidah and Sedidik general manager, Ayub Dahari.
Previously, Sarawak State Government approved an allocation of RM2.5 million for KPWK to implement the Childcare and Early Childhood Education Fee Subsidy initiative for the B40 group to reduce the burden on parents to send their children to registered facilities. -TVS
