Care work sits at the heart of women’s economic empowerment. When families lack safe, reliable childcare, women’s time and choices shrink, often forcing them to reduce work, accept lower quality jobs, or leave the labour force altogether.
Led by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University, the Deepening Evidence to Action on Childcare and Capital Levers program examines two connected drivers of women’s economic mobility: access to quality childcare and pathways to sustained financial inclusion. BIGD’s care economy research treats childcare as essential infrastructure and studies how to strengthen quality home-based childcare, expand a reliable supply of trained providers, and understand what shapes household demand for paid care. Parallelly, BIGD’s capital journey work tracks how women move from short-term support into longer-term tools such as savings, credit, and productive investments, and identifies where progress stalls so graduation programs can reduce vulnerability and strengthen pathways to resilience. Together, this research supports program and policy decisions that expand women’s choices, enable decent work, and improve well-being for children and families.
This program, funded by the Gates Foundation, supports BRAC and its research partners, including BIGD, to generate decision-ready learning on care and capital that can inform scalable approaches for Bangladesh and other contexts. The program brings together components that turn evidence into practical solutions, reinforcing childcare as essential infrastructure and improving pathways to economic resilience. By linking care and capital, the initiative supports programs and policies that expand women’s choices, enable decent work, and help families build lasting security.
Component 1 | Childcare: Strengthening Quality Childcare Delivery and Affordability
This component deepens evidence on BRAC’s home-based childcare model by examining how to build a sustainable supply of trained childcare providers, how families decide to use paid childcare, and what affordability mechanisms can support uptake without compromising quality. It also measures child development outcomes and tests innovative approaches to assessing childcare quality and early learning.
Component 2 | Graduation: Improving Cost-effectiveness and Long-term Impact
This component strengthens evidence on BRAC’s graduation programming by comparing different package designs and identifying which combinations of support deliver the strongest and most sustained improvements in well-being. It focuses on long-run trajectories, including economic resilience, empowerment, and intergenerational outcomes, so program design decisions can be guided by both impact and efficiency.
Component 3 | Capital Journeys: Mapping Financial Pathways from Support to Sustained Financial Inclusion
This component uses BRAC’s program and administrative data, linked to older graduation cohorts, to understand how women transition from graduation support into longer-term financial tools such as savings and credit, including where they get stuck or fall back. The focus is on identifying barriers, enabling factors, and moments of vulnerability so BRAC can strengthen product design, targeting, and linkages across its broader ecosystem of services, with lessons that can inform adaptation in other low and middle-income country contexts, including parts of Africa.
