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Child Care and Workers in Informal Employment

Child care is vital. Families, especially in the poorest households, rely on the earnings of women workers in informal employment. A lack of high quality public child care contributes to gender inequalities in labour force participation rates and earnings, and exacerbates high levels of poverty among women workers and the children in their care.

In response to the demand from organizations of workers in informal employment, the Social Protection Programme started the Child Care Initiative in 2014. Its aim is to encourage local and national governments to consider public child care as a key social protection measure that will reduce poverty and inequality.

Read more about our Child Care in Markets project.

ActivitiesLatest Research

WIEGO has conducted several research studies with women workers in informal employment and their organizations regarding child care. We have investigated access to child care, and how this was affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Child care was a theme in WIEGO’s COVID-19 and the Informal Economy Study, which showed how increased care responsibilities for women due to lockdowns contributed to loss of earnings, rising food insecurity and asset depletion.

In 2024, we began a research project to investigate models of child-care delivery. While there is an increasing consensus that public financing is key to the provision of affordable, accessible and quality child-care services, less attention has been paid to the various modalities of provision and what might work best in different contexts and for different constituencies. The aim is to co-create resources which could serve as a rigorously researched reference point to guide the design and implementation of child-care services.

ActivitiesPolicy Analysis and Engagements

Drawing on the policy demands emerging from engagements with organizations of workers in informal employment, WIEGO contributes to global and national policy processes. We collaborated with the ILO on producing policy briefs on child-care provision, and with UNICEF and the ILO on family-friendly policies for women working in the informal economy.

We work at national, regional and global levels to bring together diverse constituencies, including the early childhood development community, worker organizations and women’s rights organizations, to discuss improving and expanding public child-care services, and to ensure that the perspectives of workers in informal employment are well represented in these spaces.

ActivitiesMobilizing for Childcare

Women in informal employment across the world are calling for high quality public child-care services, and WIEGO members and partners are integrating child-care demands into their organizing efforts. WIEGO has developed a global advocacy Child Care Campaign that provides tools and materials in seven languages for workers and their organizations to download and use.

As well as advocating for greater public investment in child-care services, larger membership-based organizations, such as SEWA and UTEP, provide child-care services to their members through cooperatives. These examples highlight the trust and accountability that can emerge between caregivers, child-care workers and service providers through an inclusive governance structure.

Alongside global union federations, WIEGO supports mobilizations of organizations of workers in informal employment around the International Day of Care and Support. Public investment in child-care services is essential for women in informal employment, improves child development outcomes, and can create new and decent work opportunities for care workers.