Childcare Increasingly Appears on the MDB Agenda. The Hard Part is Making It Last.

COVID-19 helped expose an issue that had long been invisible—the staggering amount of unpaid care work that women do compared to men, including childcare. In the years since, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and governments have increasingly recognized this as critical to women’s economic empowerment and broader development outcomes. But recognition has outpaced policy and financing, and large gaps in childcare access, affordability, quality, and system design remain globally.

In 2021, CGD published a review of childcare investments across MDBs, as these institutions play an important role in elevating emerging issue areas and channeling financing to the poorest and most vulnerable. Our new analysis (policy paper forthcoming) updates that baseline, finding 163 projects approved across seven MDBs between June 2021 and December 2024, encompassing $20.94 billion in core financing plus $2.7 billion in co-financing and other grants—a measurable expansion since our last review.

Figure 1. Childcare project approvals rose sharply after 2021 but slowed in 2024

What’s new with childcare at the MDBs?

Since 2021, several MDBs have taken steps to elevate childcare through new initiatives, commitments, and indicators. Our review found that the most significant developments have come from the World Bank (and IFC) and the Inter-American Development Bank. Across other MDBs, childcare appears in strategies and reports, but dedicated initiatives or programs remain more limited.

What are the key programmatic shifts, and where do we still see gaps?

While some patterns have not shifted significantly—such as institutional, geographic, and country income-level distribution of projects—we observed quantitative changes in financing, attention to outcomes for women, and inclusion of childcare in results measurement. Through conversations with staff at the MDBs, we also identified shifts in how these institutions approach work on childcare.

• Childcare at the MDBs has increased in a short time. Comparing the periods January 2018–June 2021 and June 2021–December 2024, the number of projects increased 12.4 percent and financing rose 67 percent. Our prior review observed a growing number of childcare projects, but generally fewer than 35 per year (except 2020); since 2021, MDBs have approved more than 40 childcare projects per year. Dedicated efforts, research, and commitments to childcare at these institutions also expanded during the latter time period, likely contributing to this growth.
• More projects focus on childcare as a means to advance women’s economic empowerment (WEE). Our analysis found that the majority of projects positioned WEE as a primary or secondary purpose of childcare activities; for comparison, only 13 percent of projects in CGD’s 2021 review had results frameworks that focused on unpaid caregivers’ outcomes. While these measures are not identical, the contrast suggests a stronger link between childcare investments and WEE at the MDBs.
• Most projects with childcare components include results measurement, but monitoring remains uneven. Childcare appears within 63 percent of results frameworks in our sample (for example, in an indicator measuring the number of childcare centers newly opened). However, 45 projects in our sample lack a childcare-related indicator, making it difficult to track the impact of childcare activities.
• Education and social protection remain major sectoral entry points, but non-traditional entry points for childcare are growing and have high potential. MDBs tagged around 65 percent of projects under education and 45 percent under social protection, while 15 to 20 percent of projects were tagged under other sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, and water and sanitation. These non-social sectors can be powerful entry points to enable economic opportunities for women.
• MDBs include childcare more often in diagnostic analysis, and staff emphasize that this supports more sustainable programming. Just over half of the projects represent direct investments, with the remaining projects comprising research, guidance, or a combination of the two—a shift from our earlier review, in wich 80 percent of projects were standalone investments. The World Bank’s Invest in Childcare initiative has further facilitated diagnostic work through small catalytic grants, country-situation assessments and other analytic work, and impact assessments currently underway (none of which our project dataset captures).
• MDBs are placing greater emphasis on integration, scale, and sustainability. Interviews with MDB staff highlighted that childcare investments are more likely to succeed when they are supported by strong and diverse partnerships, local and government ownership, and alignment with existing systems. This matters especially as childcare moves from smaller, dedicated projects toward more integrated approaches across MDB operations.

Together, these developments suggest that childcare is becoming more visible and more clearly linked to women’s economic empowerment at the MDBs. This shift is important, but progress remains uneven, with childcare concentrated in specific institutions and sectors and not always measured in ways that capture the positive economic impacts on women.

What should MDBs do moving forward?

The challenge now is to turn institutional momentum into durable practice. Although project approvals and financing have increased overall, the dip in approvals in 2024 is a reminder that continued monitoring, financial prioritization, and institutional accountability on childcare are needed to keep the issue on the agenda.

Our forthcoming paper presents four key recommendations to guide MDBs moving forward.

1. Treat childcare as core economic infrastructure aligned with the jobs agenda.
2. Invest in diagnostics and evidence for better-designed projects.
3. Strengthen coordination, ownership, and financing across government, communities, MDBs, and the private sector to ensure childcare solutions are sustainable.
4. Strengthen measurement and accountability to track progress toward childcare-related outputs and outcomes, particularly as these relate to WEE.

In a more constrained resource environment, childcare is an enabling investment that supports better outcomes for women, children, and economies. Upcoming institutional moments, including the IDA22 replenishment in 2027, will signal whether childcare will remain a core priority of development finance.

To explore these findings and what is needed to sustain momentum on childcare, join us on Tuesday, June 16, for the virtual event “Investing in Childcare at the Multilateral Development Banks: Progress, Lessons, and the Road Ahead.” The event will feature presentations from CGD and the World Bank, followed by a panel discussion with MDB staff leading childcare work.

Methodological notes: Project numbers in our dataset were calculated based on annual approval dates. We obtained data from MDB websites, verified them with MDB staff, and reviewed them against public data in late 2024–25. This included an assessment of each project to understand whether and how childcare was substantively incorporated into the project design, activities, and monitoring and evaluation frameworks; we excluded certain projects that did not meet the threshold established in our methodology.

Our quantitative findings reflect the application of our inclusion criteria for identifying childcare components within MDB operations consistently across institutions, but we recognize that individual MDBs may use different portfolio-tracking methodologies or classification criteria. As such, project counts and financing totals reported above may differ from figures the specific institutions have published.

A policy paper outlining this research in detail, including methodology, will be available on the CGD website shortly.