Impact of Quality Childcare Services on Women’s Empowerment in Senegal

Women's participation in the labor market has declined between 2008 and 2018, with a higher proportional drop in West Africa due to several factors, including the burden of unpaid childcare (IDRC, 2020). Childcare services, one of the policy levers that could reduce women’s  time spent on unpaid work, is less common in this region, particularly in Senegal (DPRE, 2018). A 2017 literature review revealed several constraints related to this low uptake, including high costs and poor quality of services offered (Shelley et al., 2017). This study aims to explore the impact of improving the quality of childcare services on women's economic empowerment in Senegal using an RCT design and an ICRW framework. We will conduct an initial survey of 150 randomly selected households and 15 randomly selected childcare centers in the Dakar region to hone our research design. The childcare centers fall equally into five types and are evenly distributed across three arms of the evaluation.