The World Bank’s Invest in Childcare initiative: A vehicle for achieving gender equality and responding to the care crisis?

June 2023

Briefing: This briefing investigates whether the World Bank’s Invest in Childcare initiative will serve as an adequate vehicle for achieving gender equality and responding to the care crisis. While it is an important initiative on early childhood care and development, its claims for achieving gender equality are based on tenuous assumptions that will not hold true without reforms to the initiative’s approach, and it also risks diverting funds from other gender-equality-focused programmes. There are also concerns that donors, newly interested in funding care work, will over-focus on this narrowly designed initiative as a panacea for tackling the global care crisis, rather than taking a more holistic approach to the issue.