In Brazil, the number of children in daycare programs is increasing rapidly. Studies show that publicly provided daycare can benefit children’s nutrition and yield short-term benefits to children’s cognitive development, without having adverse impacts on children’s behavioral development. It can als...

A growing knowledge base offers some initial insights on design and implementation features that should be prioritized to ensure that childcare programs benefit children and parents or other caregivers, but gaps in the evidence persist.

Last month, we published a blog making the case for quality childcare as a “best buy” investment: one that can increase labor force participation, productivity, and income among workers, as well as improve broader well-being among children, caregivers, and communities. Our first blog summarized find...

Governments still need to be convinced to prioritize childcare. Context-specific data on ROI canna help with this. CGD and the World Bank’s Early Learning Partnership convened a series of technical workshops aimed at informing the approach of the newly launched World Bank Group (WBG) Invest in Child...

Achieving SDG 5 and other gender-related SDG targets will require robust data systems that can only be established through smarter and sustainable investments in data collection, analysis, and use. This necessitates renewed commitments by philanthropic and bilateral donors, governments, and internat...

Last month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Board approved the institution’s first Gender Mainstreaming Strategy. This is good news—and the process used by the IMF gender team to draft and seek feedback on the strategy bodes well for the implementation of this important work. But the proof of...

In the wake of the turmoil created by the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, there’s been a lot of discussion about the health implications of abortion care. This blog post highlights the intrinsic connection between pregnancy and economic wellbeing.

If the objective is to grow women’s businesses by providing capital infusions, programs can nudge women to invest more of their capital in their own businesses by making accessible capital in-kind (and less likely to be easily divided) or providing access to individual accounts through mobile bankin...