Care Worker Recruitment and Retention in Kenya: Building a Sustainable Workforce

Recruiting a caregiver is not the same as building a care workforce. A Kenyan home-care organisation may fill its vacancies and still struggle with continuity if workers leave after a few months. A residential service may repeatedly train new employees while losing the experienced caregivers who understand residents best. In a rural community, the problem may be different again: suitable workers exist, but distance, transport and irregular hours make the employment economically unattractive.

These are workforce sustainability questions rather than recruitment problems alone. They sit within the wider development of the Kenya Ageing, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub, because any expansion of home support, community care or residential provision ultimately depends on people being available to deliver it.

Kenya enters this challenge with important foundations. Caregiving training is becoming more visible, the country has a substantial health and community health workforce, private care organisations are developing, and the National Care Policy endorsed by Cabinet in December 2025 gives paid and unpaid care greater policy recognition. Kenya’s community health system also demonstrates what sustained investment in a distributed workforce can achieve: by 2026, government reporting described more than 107,000 Community Health Promoters supported through stipends, equipment, digital tools and continuing institutional development.

Long-term care nevertheless has its own labour-market dynamics. Care workers may be employed by organisations, engaged directly by households or move between care and other forms of employment. Demand can be uncertain, wages constrained by what families can afford, and progression unclear. Recruitment therefore needs to be understood alongside retention, working conditions, career development, workforce wellbeing and the economics of care itself.

Recruitment pressure begins with how care work is valued

Care work combines practical skill, emotional responsibility and close personal contact. Workers may help somebody wash, dress, eat, move safely or remain connected with ordinary life. They may notice subtle changes in behaviour or health before anybody else does. They may support a family through dementia, disability, frailty or the final stages of life.

Yet care can still be perceived as low-status work because some of its activities resemble tasks traditionally performed without pay inside families. That creates a structural recruitment challenge.

If care is treated primarily as an extension of domestic responsibility, employers can struggle to communicate why training, competence and judgement matter. Workers may see little reason to invest in a care career if equivalent or better income is available elsewhere with fewer emotional and physical demands.

The issue has a gender dimension as well. Unpaid care and domestic work have historically fallen disproportionately on women. Expanding paid care without addressing the value attached to that work risks transferring the same inequalities into the labour market.

Kenya’s National Care Policy creates an important framework because recognition of care has economic as well as social consequences. Translating that recognition into sustainable employment, however, depends on what happens after a worker is recruited: how they are paid, supervised, protected and developed.

The wider principle of fair work and responsible employment therefore becomes directly relevant to long-term-care capacity.

A growing training pipeline does not guarantee a stable workforce

Increasing the number of people completing caregiver training can expand potential labour supply. It does not establish how many subsequently enter long-term care, how long they remain or where they work.

That distinction matters for workforce planning.

A person may undertake caregiver training as preparation for local employment, as a pathway towards another health-related occupation or because care qualifications may support opportunities abroad. Others may enter care without following the same training route, particularly where households employ workers directly.

Kenya therefore needs to understand the journey from training to sustained employment rather than treating course completion as the final workforce outcome.

Useful intelligence would include:

• how many people complete recognised caregiving programmes;
• how many enter paid care employment after training;
• which settings and counties attract them;
• how many remain after one, two and three years;
• why workers leave employers or the sector; and
• whether experienced workers progress within care or move into other occupations.

This turns recruitment from a vacancy-filling exercise into a workforce pipeline.

Providers also need their own evidence. If twenty workers are recruited during a year and eighteen leave, celebrating twenty successful appointments conceals the actual workforce problem. Recruitment activity should be read alongside turnover, tenure, absence, supervision and continuity.

The economics of care determine what employers can offer

Retention cannot be separated from the way care is financed.

Much long-term support in Kenya remains unpaid within families. Where households purchase care privately, affordability can place a ceiling on what they are able to pay. Providers then need to cover worker wages alongside recruitment, supervision, administration, transport, training and business overheads from the price charged to families.

That creates a difficult equation. Raising wages without increasing revenue can make services financially unsustainable. Raising prices can make formal care inaccessible to more households. Keeping prices and wages low may increase turnover and weaken quality.

Publicly supported expansion of long-term care would face the same underlying requirement: workforce standards have to be funded.

This is why employment quality is ultimately a care-financing issue as well as a labour issue. Policy can specify desirable training and employment conditions, but the delivery model must generate enough resource to sustain them.

For providers, the practical response begins with understanding the true cost of a reliable service. Travel time, supervision, training and paid non-contact activity are part of care delivery even when they do not occur in front of the older person.

Ignoring those costs can produce a superficially cheaper service whose hidden price appears later through turnover, missed visits, repeated recruitment and loss of experienced workers.

A Nairobi home-care provider keeps recruiting but cannot stabilise its teams

A growing home-care organisation in Nairobi has strong demand from families and rarely struggles to attract applicants. Its recruitment figures appear healthy.

Six months later, managers notice that the same vacancies keep returning. New caregivers receive basic induction and are quickly allocated to households. Travel between clients is unpredictable, schedules change frequently and workers sometimes spend substantial unpaid time moving across the city. Experienced caregivers are regularly asked to support new colleagues while carrying full workloads of their own.

The organisation initially responds by increasing recruitment advertising. That treats the symptom rather than the cause.

A retention review produces a different picture. Workers value care itself but dislike unpredictable earnings, travel arrangements and limited progression. Families are also experiencing repeated changes of caregiver.

The provider reorganises recruitment around geographic areas, improves the way travel is reflected in schedules, introduces structured supervision and creates an experienced-caregiver role with responsibility for mentoring. Turnover becomes a management indicator alongside vacancies.

The important change is conceptual. Recruitment is no longer measured by how quickly a vacancy disappears. It is measured by whether the organisation can establish a stable relationship between a competent worker and the person receiving care.

Pay matters, but retention is wider than pay

Workers need adequate and predictable income. Where earnings are too low or irregular, other retention initiatives have limited power.

Pay alone, however, does not explain every departure.

Care workers also make decisions about workload, respect, supervision, travel, safety, working hours, career opportunities and whether management responds when difficulties arise. Two organisations offering similar wages can therefore experience very different retention.

For home-based workers, predictability can be particularly important. A nominal hourly or daily rate does not describe the real employment experience if assignments are irregular or substantial time is spent travelling without corresponding income.

Residential settings face different pressures. Continuous operation requires night, weekend and holiday coverage. Poor rota design can generate fatigue even where headline staffing appears adequate.

Retention strategy consequently needs to examine the complete employment proposition rather than relying on a single incentive.

The strongest employers are likely to understand what workers experience from recruitment onwards: whether the job was described accurately, whether induction prepared them for practice, whether supervision is accessible, whether workloads are manageable and whether good performance creates meaningful opportunity.

Continuity is a quality outcome, not merely a staffing metric

High turnover affects more than recruitment expenditure.

An older person receiving intimate personal support may need to repeatedly explain preferences, routines and communication needs to unfamiliar workers. A person living with dementia may become distressed by frequent changes. Families can lose confidence when they never know who will arrive.

Experienced workers also hold practical knowledge that may not be completely captured in records. They know that somebody becomes unsteady late in the afternoon, eats better when meals are prepared in a particular way or communicates pain through a subtle change in behaviour.

This makes staff retention part of person-centred quality.

Organisations examining these relationships can use the Predictive Workforce Risk Module to structure analysis of vacancy, turnover and continuity risk. The tool is not a Kenyan regulatory framework, but the analytical principle is transferable: workforce indicators become more useful when organisations can see their potential consequences before instability reaches the person receiving support.

Supervision can determine whether difficult work remains sustainable

Care work places workers close to illness, disability, bereavement, family tension and sometimes abuse or neglect. Home-care workers may encounter these situations alone.

Supervision provides a place to make sense of that responsibility. It can identify competence gaps, clarify boundaries, address performance and give workers somewhere to escalate concerns.

Its retention value is equally important.

A worker who encounters a difficult situation and receives no response from management learns something about the organisation. So does a worker whose concerns about unsafe lifting, excessive travel or family expectations are repeatedly ignored.

Conversely, supportive supervision can strengthen confidence and professional identity. It allows managers to recognise developing skills, discuss aspirations and intervene before frustration becomes resignation.

This makes structured supervision both a quality control and a retention mechanism.

Supervision needs to be proportionate to the setting. A small community organisation will not necessarily reproduce the management structure of a large residential provider. The essential requirement is that every worker knows who supports their practice, how concerns are escalated and how performance and development are reviewed.

Career development gives experienced workers a reason to stay

Recruitment becomes easier when people can imagine a future in the occupation.

If the only progression available to a capable caregiver is to leave care for another profession, the sector continually loses the experience it has helped create.

Kenya can avoid that by developing progression within long-term care itself. An entry-level caregiver could acquire additional competence in areas such as dementia, rehabilitation support, palliative care, complex mobility or care coordination. Experienced workers could progress into supervision, training, quality assurance or operational leadership.

Some will still move into nursing, rehabilitation or other health professions, and those pathways can be valuable. The objective is not to prevent mobility. It is to ensure that remaining in care can also represent professional progress.

Continuing professional development can help create that progression when learning is connected to real responsibilities rather than accumulated as disconnected certificates.

Employers also benefit. Developing experienced staff internally can reduce dependence on external recruitment for every supervisory or specialist role. Workers already understand the organisation, the communities it serves and the practical realities of care.

Career pathways therefore create a link between retention and organisational capability.

A skilled caregiver is preparing to leave because there is nowhere to progress

A caregiver working in a residential service in Nakuru has five years of experience. She has become particularly skilled at supporting residents living with dementia and frequently helps newer workers understand communication, routines and distress.

Her formal role and pay remain unchanged. When she asks about progression, the only suggestion is that she could train as a nurse.

She begins applying elsewhere.

The service risks losing more than one employee. It would lose accumulated knowledge, an informal mentor and continuity for residents who know her well.

Management reviews its workforce structure and creates a senior caregiver role with defined competencies, mentoring responsibilities and additional development. The role does not turn the worker into a nurse or give her responsibilities beyond her competence. It recognises advanced caregiving as valuable in its own right.

The organisation then begins identifying other employees who could follow the same pathway.

The wider lesson for Kenya is that retention improves when occupational recognition is visible inside workplaces. Professionalisation at national level will have limited effect if organisational structures still treat experienced caregivers exactly as they treated them on their first day.

Rural recruitment cannot be solved by national workforce numbers

Kenya’s 47 counties contain very different labour markets and geographies. Nairobi’s workforce dynamics cannot simply be projected onto sparsely populated or remote areas.

A rural service may struggle to recruit because qualified workers are concentrated elsewhere, because travel is expensive or because the volume of paid care is insufficient to guarantee stable employment. Younger workers may also move towards towns and cities for education and broader employment opportunities.

The consequence can be a paradox: communities with substantial care needs may offer too little formal demand to sustain a conventional care business.

Recruiting locally can help. Workers who already live within communities may have shorter journeys, stronger local knowledge and fewer reasons to relocate. Training provision therefore needs to consider geographic distribution rather than only total student numbers.

However, local recruitment should not become an argument for lower standards. Rural older people are entitled to competent support too.

Alternative operating models may include geographically clustered caseloads, outreach supervision, shared training, community-based workers supported by specialist professionals and digital access to expertise. The right model will vary between counties and communities.

The relevant workforce question is not simply “How many caregivers does Kenya have?” It is “Can a suitable worker reach this person reliably at a sustainable cost?”

That distinction connects recruitment directly with workforce planning.

Migration creates both opportunity and retention pressure

Kenya participates in an increasingly international care and health labour market. Overseas demand can create opportunities for Kenyan workers to increase earnings, develop careers and support families through remittances.

For the domestic care sector, however, international mobility can also affect retention if trained caregivers perceive substantially stronger opportunities abroad.

The appropriate response is not to treat worker mobility as disloyalty. People make rational decisions about income, careers and family circumstances.

The workforce question is how Kenya can develop domestic care employment that people actively choose to enter and remain in.

That includes pay, but also recognised qualifications, credible employers, professional status, career progression and working conditions. Where international recruitment pathways require specific competencies, they may also influence the courses workers choose and the expectations they bring to domestic employment.

Workforce planning therefore needs to understand movement rather than assuming that every person trained in Kenya remains permanently available to the Kenyan care sector.

This is another reason training-output figures alone are insufficient. A sustainable system needs information about where workers actually go.

Direct household employment creates a different retention relationship

Not all paid care takes place through formal providers. Families may recruit caregivers directly through personal networks, recommendations or employment intermediaries.

Direct employment can offer advantages. A worker may develop a close relationship with one person rather than moving between multiple households. Families can have greater continuity and flexibility.

It can also create vulnerabilities.

Job descriptions may be unclear. Working hours can expand gradually. A caregiver recruited for companionship may find themselves expected to undertake personal care, domestic work and health-related tasks. Boundaries between employment and being treated as part of the family can become blurred.

The worker may have no external supervisor, while the family has limited organisational support if concerns arise.

Retention in these arrangements depends heavily on the relationship between worker and household. That makes clear expectations particularly important.

Professionalisation could support direct employment without eliminating it. Standard role descriptions, recognised training, written employment arrangements and access to continuing development could improve clarity for both parties.

The aim should not be to assume that agency employment is inherently superior. It is to ensure that different employment models provide reasonable protection and clarity.

A family keeps changing caregivers without understanding why

A family in Kiambu directly employs a caregiver for an older parent who needs help with mobility and personal care. Three workers leave within eighteen months.

The family concludes that reliable caregivers are difficult to find.

A closer examination reveals a different problem. The advertised role gradually expands after each worker starts. The caregiver is expected to provide personal care, cook for the household, clean, accompany the older person to appointments and remain available outside agreed hours. Because the older person’s mobility has deteriorated, transfers have also become more physically demanding.

None of these changes has resulted in a review of the role, additional training or revised employment conditions.

The family’s recruitment problem is therefore partly a job-design problem.

A clearer arrangement would separate the older person’s care requirements from general household tasks, establish working hours and review whether safe mobility support requires additional equipment or expertise. As needs increase, one worker may no longer be sufficient.

This scenario matters because retention data can easily blame labour supply for problems created by employment design. Sustainable recruitment requires organisations and households to ask not only whether people are willing to work, but whether the job they are being asked to perform is itself sustainable.

Technology can reduce avoidable workforce friction

Digital systems can support retention when they remove administrative problems that make work unnecessarily difficult.

Home-care scheduling can reduce excessive travel if it uses realistic geography. Digital records can improve information available to workers before a visit. Remote supervision can make support more accessible across distance. Online learning can widen access to development.

Technology can also produce the opposite effect.

Automated schedules can compress visits unrealistically. Location tracking can feel intrusive. Poorly designed applications can transfer administrative work onto caregivers. Workers with limited digital confidence can be disadvantaged if new systems are introduced without training.

Organisations considering digital workforce infrastructure can use the Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment to examine whether governance, workforce capability and processes are sufficiently mature for change. It is a generic analytical framework rather than a Kenyan compliance tool.

The practical test is straightforward: technology should increase the proportion of worker time that contributes meaningfully to care, coordination and learning without creating disproportionate surveillance or administrative burden.

Retention risk should be visible before continuity breaks down

Many workforce problems are detectable before a resignation arrives.

Increasing sickness absence, missed supervision, repeated requests for schedule changes, declining engagement, unfilled shifts and excessive reliance on a small number of experienced workers can all indicate instability.

Providers therefore need a small set of workforce measures that managers actually use.

These may include vacancy duration, turnover, tenure, absence, training completion, supervision, workload, continuity and reasons for leaving. Data should be segmented sufficiently to reveal differences between locations, teams and roles.

The purpose is not to create elaborate reporting for its own sake. It is to identify patterns early enough to respond.

A provider with low overall turnover may discover that new employees are leaving rapidly during their first three months. Another may retain most staff while losing its most experienced caregivers. A third may have stable headcount but depend heavily on overtime or workers covering large distances.

Those are different risks requiring different responses.

Organisations can use the Quality Dashboard Builder to explore how workforce indicators can be viewed alongside service quality and outcome information. The broader governance principle is particularly relevant to an emerging care sector: staffing data becomes more meaningful when leaders can see its relationship with missed support, complaints, incidents and continuity.

Worker wellbeing and service quality are connected

Care is relational work. Exhaustion, anxiety and chronic overload can affect the worker as well as the person receiving support.

That does not mean every difficult experience can be removed. Care work inevitably includes emotional demands. The organisational question is whether those demands are recognised and managed.

Workers need safe ways to discuss distressing situations, bereavement, conflict and mistakes. They need predictable rest, appropriate workloads and support after serious incidents. Managers also need to recognise when informal expectations of resilience become a substitute for adequate staffing.

The principles of staff wellbeing and engagement are therefore closely connected to retention.

There is an important balance. Wellbeing initiatives should not become superficial benefits layered over insecure employment or excessive workloads. A social event cannot compensate for repeated unpaid travel, and resilience training cannot resolve chronic understaffing.

The strongest workforce cultures combine reasonable employment conditions with meaningful support, recognition and worker voice.

A rural team appears stable until one departure exposes its fragility

A community-based provider supports older people across several dispersed settlements. Its turnover rate is low and managers regard the workforce as stable.

One experienced caregiver then leaves for employment in a larger town.

The consequences are disproportionate. She had been covering the widest geographic area, informally mentoring two newer workers and maintaining relationships with several families. Her remaining colleagues absorb the visits, increasing travel and extending their working days.

Within weeks, another worker begins considering leaving.

The organisation realises that headcount had concealed concentration risk. Too much practical knowledge and too many relationships depended on one person.

The response includes redistributing caseloads, formalising mentoring, training another worker in key competencies and reviewing travel arrangements. Management also begins tracking whether individual employees are carrying responsibilities that would be difficult to replace.

This is workforce resilience rather than conventional vacancy management. The relevant question is not only whether somebody can be recruited after a departure, but whether the service can continue safely while that happens.

The broader principles of workforce resilience and continuity become particularly important where labour markets are small or geography makes rapid replacement difficult.

Safe recruitment must remain part of workforce expansion

Pressure to recruit quickly can weaken safeguards if employers treat screening as an obstacle to growth.

Long-term-care workers may enter private homes, handle personal information, assist with intimate care and spend substantial periods alone with people who depend on them. Recruitment therefore needs reasonable checks on identity, qualifications, employment history and suitability, alongside clear conduct expectations.

Safe recruitment should also be proportionate to Kenya’s developing care market. Systems that become excessively bureaucratic can unintentionally exclude experienced workers or encourage families to recruit entirely outside formal channels.

The stronger direction is to make trustworthy information easier to establish.

Recognised qualifications, clearer occupational standards and better employment records can make it easier for a future employer to understand what a worker has previously done. References and documented supervision can add further evidence.

Where concerns arise after recruitment, organisations need defined routes for investigation, protection and escalation. This connects recruitment with the wider principles of safe employment practice and responding to allegations.

Retention should never become an objective at any cost. A stable workforce is valuable because it supports safe, consistent relationships; retaining somebody whose practice presents serious unresolved risk would undermine that purpose.

County variation needs to become part of national workforce intelligence

Kenya’s devolved structure means long-term-care workforce development will intersect with county health systems, local labour markets and community infrastructure.

National policy can help establish common direction around care recognition, qualifications and workforce development. Counties can contribute a more detailed understanding of local population needs, health infrastructure, workforce distribution and geographic access.

Providers and training institutions hold another part of the picture. They can identify recruitment difficulties, changing skill requirements and whether newly trained workers are finding sustainable employment.

Connecting those perspectives would allow workforce policy to move beyond national totals.

A county experiencing persistent shortages may need local training capacity or different service models. Another may have adequate labour supply but high turnover because employment is fragmented. Urban areas may attract workers while still experiencing instability because competition between employers is intense.

These are not contradictions. They show why recruitment and retention need local interpretation.

The governance challenge is to create enough common information to identify patterns without assuming every county needs the same workforce response.

Public policy can influence the care labour market without becoming the sole employer

Kenya does not need every long-term-care worker to become a government employee in order for public policy to shape workforce conditions.

Government influences training systems, employment law, social protection, health policy, occupational development and the wider care economy. Counties influence local service infrastructure and health delivery. Any future public financing or purchasing of long-term care would also influence the employment models that providers can sustain.

The experience of Community Health Promoters is relevant without being directly transferable. Kenya has progressively formalised a large community health workforce through training, stipends, equipment, digital infrastructure and shared national-county support. Government reporting in 2026 described continuing efforts to standardise support and strengthen the welfare of more than 107,000 CHPs.

Long-term-care workers perform different roles and will require different arrangements. The transferable principle lies in recognising that community-facing workforces require institutional support if they are expected to become dependable parts of a national system.

Policy can therefore help establish the conditions within which a mixed care economy develops: clearer roles, credible qualifications, fair employment expectations, workforce information and stronger accountability.

Recruitment strategy should begin with retention evidence

Organisations often respond to workforce shortages by increasing recruitment. Sometimes that is exactly what is required. At other times it simply feeds more workers into an employment model that continually loses them.

Before expanding recruitment, a provider should understand why existing employees stay and why others leave.

Exit information can help, but waiting until somebody resigns is late. Supervision, worker feedback and routine workforce data can identify concerns earlier.

The most useful questions are practical. Are new starters leaving before becoming fully competent? Do particular managers or locations experience higher turnover? Are workers leaving after schedules become more complex? Is progression available? Are experienced employees carrying excessive informal responsibility? Are people leaving care altogether or simply moving to another employer?

This evidence changes recruitment itself. Job descriptions can become more realistic. Selection can focus on people whose expectations match the role. Induction can address the situations that new workers actually encounter. Workforce planning can distinguish genuine labour shortages from avoidable organisational turnover.

For organisations developing a more systematic approach, the Governance Maturity Assessment can help structure thinking about accountability, oversight and whether workforce risks are reaching the people responsible for strategic decisions. Its value in an international context lies in the governance discipline rather than any country-specific regulatory status.

A sustainable workforce needs a sustainable employment proposition

Kenya’s long-term-care labour market will continue to evolve as formal services expand, care work gains greater policy recognition and families seek alternatives or supplements to unpaid support.

Recruitment strategies will need to evolve with it.

Advertising more vacancies cannot compensate indefinitely for poor retention. Training more caregivers cannot guarantee capacity if workers do not enter or remain in the sector. Professional recognition will have limited effect if jobs provide little security or progression.

A sustainable employment proposition brings those components together. Workers need clarity about the role they are entering, credible preparation, fair treatment, competent supervision, opportunities to develop and reasonable confidence that greater skill will be recognised.

Employers need enough financial stability to provide those conditions. Families need services they can trust and afford. Government needs sufficient workforce intelligence to understand whether national policy is producing practical capacity across different counties.

Those interests are not always easy to reconcile, but they are interconnected. Low-cost employment that generates continual turnover can ultimately be expensive for providers and disruptive for older people. Higher workforce standards that make formal care unaffordable can push demand back into unregulated arrangements.

The stronger direction is gradual development of a labour market in which quality employment and quality care reinforce each other.

International learning is about labour-market design, not copying another care system

Countries with more established long-term-care systems also experience recruitment and retention difficulties. Ageing populations, competition for workers, low occupational status, demanding working conditions and international migration affect many care economies.

Their institutional responses cannot simply be transferred to Kenya. Funding systems, wage structures, regulation and formal service coverage differ substantially.

The transferable lesson lies instead in recognising that workforce shortages are rarely solved through recruitment alone.

Where turnover is high, increasing training supply can create a larger revolving door. Where jobs lack progression, professional education may encourage workers to leave rather than stay. Where rural employment is economically unviable, national headcount targets do not create local access.

Kenya has the advantage of developing parts of its long-term-care workforce architecture while the formal sector is still emerging. That creates an opportunity to connect workforce policy with financing, community infrastructure and service design earlier rather than attempting to repair deeply embedded labour-market problems later.

Conclusion

Kenya’s ability to expand long-term care will depend as much on keeping capable workers as on recruiting them. The workforce challenge is therefore not simply to produce more trained caregivers, but to create employment in which people can develop competence, build relationships and see a credible future.

That requires attention to the economics of care. Families and providers cannot sustain employment standards that the underlying funding model does not support. It also requires better workforce intelligence: training numbers, vacancies and headcount need to be connected with turnover, geography, experience, progression and continuity for older people.

National policy can strengthen recognition of care work and establish common direction, while counties, training institutions and providers translate that direction into very different local labour markets. Employers have their own responsibilities too. Supervision, realistic job design, worker wellbeing, career development and responsive management can determine whether recruitment investment becomes lasting capacity or repeated replacement.

The human outcome remains the most important measure. An older person benefits little from a service that is permanently recruiting if the people supporting them continually change. A sustainable workforce is one in which competent workers can stay long enough to know the people they support, develop expertise and contribute to improving the service around them. Building that stability will be central to turning Kenya’s growing recognition of care into dependable long-term support.