Policies initiative, which advocates for government and business support to families in providing nurturing care for young children. This brief argues for greater investment in affordable and quality childcare, highlighting its potential to secure a ‘triple dividend’ of young children’s positive development, women’s empowerment and economic growth.
Our starting point is a global crisis of care – which isleaving millions of children without adequate supportand placing severe constraints on their caregivers, who are primarily mothers, grandmothers and girls.1Several stylized facts underline these points.
Currently, millions of children lack access to quality care:
- In 76 low- and middle-income countries (LICs andMICs), just over one in five children under age 5(some 45 million) lacked adult supervision for at least an hour in a given week.2
- In 67 LICs and MICs, nearly 57 million children aged 3 to 5 (69 percent) did not attend an early childhood education programme.
- In LICs and MICs, 43 per cent of children underage 5 – an estimated 250 million – risk suboptimal development due to poverty and stunting.