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 conference program and speaker bios
  • 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. 

This event at Yale University on May 7-8, 2025 provided 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 aimed 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 was 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 the County Government of Tharaka Nithi and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Yale University, Kenyatta University, Bangor University and the University of the West Indies - 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 was 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, the Tharaka Nithi County government in Kenya, Bangor University and the University of the West Indies were also key collaborators for the event and the underlying central research project that serves as the base for the planned activities. The event was 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.

Speakers at the event included: