Designing quality care: Insights on advancing child development and women’s empowerment

Event Details

• Date and Venue:
  • Day 1: 7 May 2025
    • Rosenfeld Hall – 109 Grove Street, New Haven, CT
    • Link to the agenda
    • Register here to attend the day-long policy-research event on May 7 (registration required)
  • Day 2: 8 May 2025
    • Invite-only

Event Overview

Women worldwide spend more time on childcare responsibilities, limiting their ability to pursue other rewarding activities and build stable careers. Access to affordable, quality childcare has the potential to offer multiple benefits: enhancing women’s well-being and economic empowerment, aiding child development, and improving household welfare. There is thus immense value in designing and testing cost-effective childcare solutions, particularly in low-income settings, to help unlock these gains for young mothers, their children and their families. 

May 7-8, 2025 will provide an opportunity for experts in the fields of child development, economics and gender to come together for a two-part policy research event at Yale University, with a particular focus on insights and applications for policy in Kenya.

Part 1: Insights from research and policy

The first part of the event aims to further our shared understanding of how childcare programs can be designed to advance child development and women’s socioeconomic outcomes, drawing from research across a variety of contexts, and to identify high priority policy questions for future research.

Part 2: Assessing the potential and path to scale in Kenya

The second part of the event will be a forum to discuss additional insights from an ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT) field study of an innovative public preschool program in Tharaka Nithi County (TNC), Kenya - being implemented in partnership with Kenyatta University and the County government - and to work together with key policy stakeholders to determine the potential and possible pathways to scale up the intervention in TNC and beyond.  

This event is hosted by Yale Economic Growth Center and Yale Inclusion Economics, in collaboration with the MacMillan Center Council on African Studies at Yale University and the Gates Foundation. The Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Hub at Kenyatta University and the Tharaka Nithi County government in Kenya are also key collaborators for the event and the underlying central research project that serves as the base for the planned activities. The event is made possible with support from the Gates Foundation, the J-PAL Learning for All Initiative, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the EGC Incubation Fund, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Confirmed speakers and contributors at the event include: Joyce Adolwa (Save the Children), Ingvild Almås (Stockholm University), Helen Baker-Henningham (Bangor University), Radu Ban (Gates Foundation), Florencia Lopez Boo (New York University), Marsha Bowers (The University of the West Indies), Sarah Deschênes (Africa Gender Innovation Lab, World Bank), Anne Fitzpatrick (The Ohio State University), Deanna Ford (Yale University), Taja Francis (The University of the West Indies), Rachel Hartgen (CARE), Amer Hasan (World Bank), John Eric Humphries (Yale University), Costas Meghir (Yale University), Brian Murithi (Kenyatta University), Teresa Mwoma (Kenyatta University), Dorothy Naivasha (Tharaka Nithi County Government), Christopher Neilson (Yale University), Michelle Neuman (Results for Development), Hon. Onesmus Muthomi Njuki (Governor, Tharaka Nithi County Government), Simon Onywere (Kenyatta University), Samson Oteyo (Kenyatta University), Deniz Sanin (University of South Carolina), Ms. Anne Wang'ombe (Principal Secretary, State Department for Gender and Affirmative Action, Kenya), Ms. Grace Wasike (Director Social Economic Empowerment, State Department for Gender and Affirmative Action, Kenya) and Judith Waudo (Kenyatta University).