Economics & Development

Childcare burdens limit productivity among women in the informal sector, but little is known about the optimal design of childcare support. The study randomizes 883 women market vendors in Kampala, Uganda to receive free workplace- or community-based childcare. Free childcare redistributes caregiving away from household members, raises women’s hourly earnings, and improves child development and women’s well-being. Community centers achieve higher utilization and larger gains in development and well-being, while workplace centers generate larger economic impacts. Both models have a high marginal value of public funds. Community centers currently dominate, but workplace-based centers could prove superior if operated at scale.

This in-depth Policy Indicators Brief introduces the Women's Lived Experience (W-LEX) Data, a new data collection tool developed by the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project in partnership with Gallup, Inc. W-LEX measures how women's economic rights are experienced and perceived in everyday life across ten WBL topics. It captures women's self-reported ability to move freely, find and advance in work, run a business, and prepare financially for old age, together with women's and men's perceptions of women's access to equal pay, decision-making power, maternity leave, childcare, assets, and protection from violence. This in-depth brief uses these data to construct the W-LEX index, a composite measure of women's voices on their economic rights and opportunities, built from women's responses only. Men's responses, covering both their own experiences and their perceptions of women's conditions, are used for comparison. Drawing on data from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Nigeria, the brief highlights differences across countries and between women and men within the same country. Women are consistently more pessimistic than men about economic conditions in the society they share. The findings confirm that identical laws can produce different outcomes in practice and demonstrate the value of W-LEX as a tool for research and policy, identifying where legal rights remain disconnected from women's economic realities, opening new questions as to why these gaps persist, and suggesting areas for and sequencing of further reforms.