Smart investment in global childcare requires local solutions and a coordinated research agenda

Abstract

Childcare is a smart investment and key for advancing gender equity. An emerging body of evidence demonstrates that providing childcare services contributes to improved health, well-being and economic opportunities for children, women, families and communities with potential for intergenerational impacts.1–4 For these reasons, investment in care systems is said to result in a ‘triple dividend’: facilitating women’s entry into the labour market, promoting child development and boosting employment in the care sector, a predominantly female workforce.3 Nonetheless, attention to and investment in accessible, affordable, context-specific and high-quality care services still lag behind other forms of social protection. For example, despite an unprecedented global response to the pandemic, out of 3099 social protection and labour market measures enacted or planned by governments through July 2021, less than 20% took gender into account, and only 7% supported unpaid care.5 Support of unpaid care was particularly low in sub-Saharan Africa, representing only 2% of all measures. Recognising the critical role of robust care systems in catalysing changes in gender norms around women’s participation in economic activities (and men’s role in care work), child-care is high on the post-pandemic agenda.4 6–8 The Generation Equality Forum in Paris in 2021 galvanised commitment to address the care crisis, launching the Childcare Incentive Fund. The fund mobilises $180million in new investment to support the design and implementation of childcare programmes, and to improve evidence generation and policy designs in low/middle-income countries.9 While this is a welcome step, efforts are needed to ensure an approach that prioritises locally led and culturally adapted implementation, systems-building and evidence-generation by national scholars. Without these efforts, the agenda on childcare risks misalignment with local realities and national policy priorities. In this commentary, we highlight the value of a coordinated research agenda taking an African regional perspective. In discussion with childcare implementers and researchers involved in the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) cross-country childcare research and programming portfolio, we propose four key areas and corresponding questions which could serve as a starting point for such a research agenda. We highlight innovative local solutions to the childcare crisis as examples and inspiration for how investment can be nationally led and lay the ground-work for systems-building. In closing, we discuss broader issues linked to unpaid care work, as well as policy and structural barriers which must be addressed to advance the childcare agenda and women’s social and economic empowerment in Africa and beyond.

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