Synopsis

Investments in childcare deliver benefits on multiple fronts: they improve child development outcomes, enable women’s labor force participation, strengthen family welfare, and contribute to more inclusive economic growth. Demand for childcare support from World Bank Group client countries and partners is growing rapidly. World Bank operations supporting childcare have expanded from just six projects a decade ago to more than 130 in 2025, including in 36 low-income countries, reflecting increasing recognition of childcare as a critical investment in jobs, gender equality, and human capital.

Development Challenge

Access to affordable, quality childcare can generate multigenerational benefits by supporting children’s development, enabling women’s employment and entrepreneurship, and creating jobs in the care economy. Yet childcare remains inaccessible for many families worldwide. Nearly 350 million children lack adequate childcare, undermining future workforce skills. Women’s labor market participation is restricted by unpaid care burdens; women spend 3.2 times more time than men on care work, contributing to 708 million women’s exclusion from jobs and entrepreneurship. Childcare markets remain underdeveloped, informal, and weakly regulated, despite significant demand. Expanding the childcare workforce to meet current needs could create an estimated 43-96million jobs globally, yet the sector faces a shortage of qualified childcare workers.

WBG Approach

In response to these constraints, the World Bank Group supports countries to strengthen childcare systems through evidence generation, policy reform, systems strengthening, and operational investments. This support includes:

• Building a strong analytical and evidence base through national childcare situation assessments, country diagnostics, flagship reports such as Better Jobs and Brighter Futures: Investing in Childcare to Build Human Capital, data from Women, Business and the Law, operational guidance, and rigorous evaluations supported by the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Labs to identify childcare constraints and inform effective policy and investment solutions.
• Supporting policy reform and systems strengthening through regulatory and institutional reforms, sustainable financing frameworks, workforce development, and quality assurance systems that enable diverse childcare models across the public and private sectors.
• Catalyzing operational investments and scale-up by integrating childcare into government programs and development operations and supporting diverse delivery models, including community-based childcare, employer-supported childcare, childcare entrepreneurship, and public-private partnerships.

This work is enabled through a One World Bank Group approach and strategic partnerships. The World Bank and IFC work together to advance policy reform and build other aspects of the enabling environment, combining regulatory and institutional reforms, public investment, and private sector engagement to improve the delivery of childcare services. Initiatives such as Invest in Childcare and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) provide financing, technical assistance, and knowledge-sharing platforms that help countries expand access to quality childcare, support children’s development, and advance women’s economic opportunities.

Pilot investments helped demonstrate childcare’s quadruple win for children, women, businesses, and economies. Evidence from DRC and Burkina Faso shows gains in child development, women’s work, earnings, household income, and productivity. Building on these results, childcare investments are increasingly being scaled through government systems and in partnership with the private sector.

Results

Policy and regulatory reforms that address both demand- and supply-side constraints help build a supportive ecosystem for diverse providers to expand access to quality, affordable childcare services that meet the needs of women and families and enable women to enter the labor market or move into better jobs, while creating local jobs in the care sector.

• In Jordan, implementation of the National Childcare Policy is expected to nearly double enrollment within four years through childcare subsidies and provider grants that make services more affordable and accessible, supported by quality assurance systems, workforce development, and the planned establishment by 700 new facilities, 1,000 new jobs (primarily for women). Complementing these efforts, IFC’s Care Arabia program is helping strengthen the sustainability and bankability of private childcare providers through business advisory support, capacity building, and access to finance, further supporting the expansion of quality childcare services.

• In Cabo Verde, regulatory reforms more than doubled the number of accredited childcare centers and are projected to double again by the end of 2026. Targeted investments are supporting the expansion of demand-side subsidies, and workforce training.

• In Viet Nam, reforms have expanded childcare for industrial park workers through Labor Code provisions, subsidies, implementation guidance, and a national scheme for urban areas and industrial parks. From 2020 to 2024, more than 181,000 children received childcare subsidies, exceeding targets and helping women access more stable, formal employment.

Where comprehensive policy reform may take time, existing government programs can offer practical entry points for scaling childcare through platforms that already reach families. This can expand access, support child development and women’s economic participation, build the childcare workforce, and contribute to broader goals in social protection, health, nutrition, and education.

• In Rwanda, childcare services delivered through the national social protection public works program have created year-round jobs for about 28,000 women running community and home-based centers, which are serving more than 72,000 young children as of September 2025.
• In Côte d’Ivoire, trusted community health and nutrition hubs are integrating quality community-based childcare, reaching 60,000 children, with a pathway to scale to 733,535 by 2028, equivalent to 50 percent of children living in rural areas.

WBG Targets and Jobs

Childcare is increasingly recognized as a cross-cutting investment that helps advance several World Bank Group priorities simultaneously. By reducing care constraints, childcare enables more women to participate in employment, entrepreneurship, and other productive activities, contributing to the Jobs agenda and the objectives of the Gender Strategy 2024–2030. As part of stronger social protection and care systems, childcare helps women engage in economic inclusion, livelihoods, and graduation pathways, supporting the SP500 target to reach 500 million people by 2030, half of them women and girls. In agriculture and rural economies, childcare helps women participate more productively in agrifood systems and access better economic opportunities, contributing to the AgriConnect initiative. The childcare sector itself is a source of potential job creation; up to 90 million new childcare jobs are estimated to be needed worldwide.  Many of the new jobs could be created by supporting women entrepreneurs to launch or grow childcare businesses; by ensuring they have access to finance, the approach will contribute to the WBG target to reach 80 million more women with access to finance.

Lesson Learned

Addressing both supply and demand constraints is critical to scaling childcare effectively. Scaling requires coordinated action across regulation, financing, quality, affordability, and access. Experience from Jordan shows that combining workforce professionalization (supply) with subsidies and matching platforms (demand), alongside employer-supported childcare, is critical to expanding uptake and access.

Similarly, leveraging existing platforms offers a practical pathway to scale childcare while also creating jobs. Embedding childcare into existing systems, such as public works in Rwanda and village-based health platforms in Côte d’Ivoire, offers a practical pathway to scale. These approaches not only build human capital from a young age but also create jobs and support formalization when paired with workforce development and regulation, as seen in Viet Nam.

Next Steps

As jobs remain the World Bank Group’s north star, childcare, as an early investment in the future workforce, an enabler of women’s employment and entrepreneurship and a job-creating sector is taking center stage. Childcare expansion requires public regulation and private sector.

Public investments are foundational to expanding access, ensuring affordability and strengthening quality assurance in childcare systems. At the same time, private sector engagement is critical for scale and sustainability including through employer-supported childcare, public private partnerships, and increased financing for providers. Childcare entrepreneurship models, combining grants, concessional finance, and business support, are an emerging approach in Bangladesh, Republic of Congo, India, Kyrgyz Republic and Uganda that expand childcare, create jobs, strengthen women’s economic empowerment, while investing in families, children, and overall economies.