Striving for Affordable Child Care in Bangladesh

One silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its resulting child care crisis, is that an increasing number of countries have passed legislation supporting the child care sector. These include Vietnam, Peru, Argentina, and Bangladesh.

On today’s episode of The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, we hear about Bangladesh’s efforts to increase access to child care, particularly for working parents. Bangladeshi lawmakers passed the Child Daycare Centre Act in 2021, and last year, they proposed implementation guidelines.

In the first part of the show, host Reena Ninan speaks with Marina Elefante, a lawyer with the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law Project. Ninan asks Elefante about the World Bank’s involvement in increasing child care in Bangladesh and what this law did to support day cares.

Then, senior producer Laura Rosbrow-Telem talks with day care managers in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital and largest city, to gauge their opinion of the law. Producer Alvah Amit Halder provided reporting and production assistance from Dhaka.

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