Elevating Childcare Work: From Informality to Dignified Employment

Childcare work is essential infrastructure for families, economies, and early childhood development. Yet across many contexts, the people who provide care—especially women—operate in informal settings with limited recognition, weak protections, and uneven pathways to professional growth.

Dignified childcare work means fair treatment, safe working conditions, skills development, and voice in decisions that shape the sector. It also means recognising childcare enterprises—including women-led micro-enterprises—as legitimate actors who need financing, regulation that enables quality, and access to networks of peer learning.

CAC’s Women in Childcare Technical Working Group advances this agenda by connecting practitioners, policymakers, and partners around leadership, economic empowerment, and gender-responsive models. The goal is not to romanticise care work, but to professionalise and protect it while keeping the best interests of the child at the centre.

In practice, dignity shows up when training is accessible, when standards are clear and supportive rather than punitive, and when contributions of care workers are acknowledged in policy and public narrative. It shows up when local ownership is strengthened and when partners share tools instead of reinventing them in isolation.

Elevating childcare work is inseparable from quality childcare for children. When workers thrive, children receive more consistent nurturing care—and societies unlock the full promise of early childhood systems.