About the Guidelines

Purpose

The Creche Guidelines provide a common and practical reference for planning, setting up and operating creches. They are designed to maintain consistent practices across key areas such as child safety, nutrition, health, hygiene, growth monitoring, feeding, community engagement and medical referrals in creche program.

The guidelines translate the Creche program’s approach and objectives into clear, actionable guidance for day-to-day implementation. They support teams in understanding what needs to be done, how it should be done and when it should be done.

The overall purpose is to ensure that every creche provides a safe, nurturing and responsive environment where children aged 7 months to 3 years receive appropriate care, nutrition and support for healthy growth and development.

Who is this for?

The Creche Guidelines are primarily intended for the organizations and their program teams involved in implementing the Creche Program. They are relevant to different cadres involved in planning, setting up, supporting and monitoring creches, including: Program manager, Cluster coordinator, MIS, Training, Logistics coordinators, Safety coordinators etc.

The guidelines provide a shared reference for all teams, helping ensure consistency in implementation while enabling each cadre to understand and carry out its respective roles and responsibilities.

How to Navigate the Guidelines

The guidelines are organized around the different stages of the Creche Operations. Readers can refer to the sections relevant to the stage they are working on rather than reading the entire document from beginning to end.

a. Pre-Setup Phase

This section helps teams prepare for starting the Creche operations. It covers areas such as understanding the program, team recruitment and orientation, engagement with government functionaries, village identification and planning community interventions.

b. Setup Phase

This section provides guidance on activities required to make a creche ready for operations. These include community engagement, identification and preparation of the creche space, household listing, caregiver selection and training, procurement, vendor identification and arranging the required materials and resources.

c. Operational Phase

This section is a reference for the regular functioning of creches. It covers areas such as child enrolment, daily routines, feeding and sleeping practices, growth monitoring, health and medical referrals, safety and security, documentation, review meetings, capacity building and the use of the Shishu Ghar application.

Use the Guidelines as a Working Reference

The guidelines are intended to be used during planning, implementation, training, supervision and review. Teams can navigate directly to the relevant section based on the activity or issue they are working on.

Wherever applicable, the guidelines link to or refer to specific modules, checklists, formats, tools and videos. These should be used together with the relevant protocol to ensure that the prescribed process is followed.

The Creche Guidelines are live documents and will evolve with the program. They are continuously updated based on our experience and learnings from the field, feedback from program teams and partners, and emerging needs and evidence.

As a result, the guidelines may change over time. Users are encouraged to check the Update Log section regularly to understand what has been updated, added or revised in the latest version.

The most recent updates and changes can be found in the Release Notes section of this website.