About the project

Partner: International Labour Organization (ILO)
The care economy refers to a diverse range of paid and unpaid activities/work that support caregiving in all its forms. Care is essential for everyone’s physical, psychological, and social well-being, but especially for children, older persons, persons with disabilities, and persons with chronic illness. Women and girls traditionally bear the brunt of care work. Across the world, women and girls are performing more than three-quarters of the total amount of unpaid care work, and two thirds of care workers are women. This unequal gender-based distribution of care work adversely influences women’s paid employment opportunities and treatments. The overburden of care responsibilities negatively impacts the type of paid job opportunities that women access and the conditions and quality of their employment, resulting in the over-representation of women in less favourable employment including in unregulated and informal sector jobs. The Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MoWCA), the Government of Bangladesh has recognized the importance of addressing challenges associated with unpaid care work and promoting investment in the care economy to advance gender equality and sustainable development. Among care work, childcare has been identified as a key area to strengthen to ensure wellbeing of children and support women9s access to employment and leadership positions. In this context, the ILO Country Office in Bangladesh has been working with MoWCA, and the ILO is seeking a service of a national consultant/consulting institution to contribute to the efforts of strengthening childcare in Bangladesh. To build on the progress so far and to scale up the on-going initiatives to realize accessible and affordable quality childcare supported by workers enjoying decent work, a strategic and step-by-step scale-up approach must be developed and adopted in line with the existing policy frameworks. Thus, it is planned to develop a roadmap for childcare in Bangladesh. The roadmap for childcare in Bangladesh will include a vision and principles for realizing accessible and affordable quality childcare and illustrate a practical plan of actions towards building childcare framework and systems in Bangladesh. It will also outline the engagement of the key actors (state, private sector and market actors) and strategies for sustainable finance for childcare in Bangladesh.

Objective of the Assignment:
The overall objective of this assignment is to contribute to realize accessible and affordable quality childcare supported by workers enjoying decent work in Bangladesh. This assignment specifically has the following objectives:

• To have data/information available to inform the development of a roadmap for childcare in Bangladesh
• To have a roadmap for strengthening childcare in Bangladesh. This roadmap for childcare in Bangladesh will be developed based on a comprehensive analysis of emerging childcare demands, childcare as care work, and thereby inform the pathway to harness the potential of developing the economy around childcare. The assignment is expected to generate data and evidence on the emerging childcare needs and inform the specific policy areas and interventions in developing a robust roadmap for childcare in Bangladesh