Catalyzing the care economy in South Africa

This project will contribute to addressing the youth-employment challenge and the issue of access to affordable quality childcare services in South Africa. The latter prevents women from pursuing attractive economic opportunities outside the household. The project will entail evaluating and strengthening childcare service-delivery business models and identifying investment-ready businesses, especially women-led ones. It will also entail supporting the scaling of promising early childhood development (ECD) social enterprises and the hiring of more youth in the ECD sector.

The project will involve partnerships with key stakeholders and social enterprises committed to enabling universal access to childcare services through strategic investments. The creation of a care-economy coalition and task force will provide a platform for dialogue and knowledge sharing between social enterprises, policymakers and the Government of South Africa.

This project is part of the “Transforming the care economy through impact investing” joint initiative with the Soros Economic Development Fund. With counterpart projects in Latin America and Southeast Asia, it adds a business-support component to the knowledge-generation component of the initiative.