Turkish government to offer financial support to grandmothers for childcare

Hacer Boyacıoğlu - ANKARA

Grandmothers who look after their grandchildren while their parents are at work will be offered financial support in a pilot project, Labor Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu has said. 

“We have been working on new projects to ensure the number of women employed does not drop. We will start a pilot project to offer financial support to grandmothers who look after their grandchildren while their parents are at work. The details of the projects have not been clear yet,” he told journalists in Ankara on Jan. 4.

Children up to three years of age would be prioritized in the project. 

A childcare at home project has been underway since 2015 with the support of the European Union. The project, which was first launched in the provinces of İzmir, Antalya and Bursa with the inclusion of 6,000 women, was extended to Istanbul and Ankara in 2016. The project aims to reach out to 5,000 women in these two cities. Mothers who have children younger than two years of age, but who have to be back at work, are paid 320 euros of pension to employ caretakers, within the framework of this project, which is expected to end in the third quarter of 2017. 

Meanwhile, Müezzinoğlu stressed that the rate of informal employment decreased to 34.6 percent. 

“This is not enough. The cost of one percentage point here is around 2 billion liras to the state. We also need to raise the rate of employment,” he added.