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Across Africa, conversations on the care economy and women’s economic security are shifting. The question is no longer simply whether governments should recognize unpaid care work or expand women’s access to finance. The more urgent question is whether our public-finance systems, urban infrastructure and economic-development programmes are being redesigned to respond to women’s lived realities.

Three recent publications from Kenya and Rwanda offer timely insights into this transition. They point towards a common conclusion: women’s economic security and opportunity cannot be achieved through isolated interventions. It requires coordinated systems that recognize women’s time, finance care infrastructure, strengthen public accountability and address the multiple conditions that determine whether women can participate meaningfully in economic life.

1. Gender-responsive budgeting must become an accountability system

The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability Secretariat’s Gender Responsive Budgeting in Rwanda: Case Study presents Rwanda’s experience of integrating gender considerations into its wider public-financial-management system.

Its most important contribution is the recognition that gender-responsive budgeting is not about creating a separate budget for women. It is about ensuring that mainstream public resources respond equitably to the different realities of women, men, girls and boys.

Rwanda’s approach connects gender analysis to budget call circulars, Gender Budget Statements, programme objectives, expenditure tracking, sex-disaggregated performance information, audits and parliamentary scrutiny. Gender equality is therefore considered throughout the budget cycle, rather than being confined to policy statements or small programmes administered by gender ministries.

This has significant implications for Kenya.

Kenya has developed important policy foundations, including the National Care Policy, the National Policy on Women’s Economic Empowerment, the Social Protection Act 2025 and commitments under the Fourth Medium-Term Plan. The next test is whether these commitments can be traced through public budgets, expenditures and measurable service-delivery outcomes.

For the care economy, this means asking practical questions:

• Are childcare, eldercare, disability support and caregiver services visible within national and county budgets?
• Are unpaid, deficient and unsupported caregivers receiving appropriate social-protection support?
• Are allocations accompanied by measurable targets and sex-disaggregated indicators?
• Can Parliament and County Assemblies establish whether allocated resources have actually improved access, affordability and quality?
• Do audit reports assess the gender and care-related results of public expenditure?

Kenya could draw on the Rwandan experience to develop a care- and gender-responsive public-financial-management framework for the National Treasury, Parliament, county governments and county assemblies. Without such a framework, even progressive policies may remain disconnected from the institutions and resources required for implementation.

2. Childcare as an economic infrastructure

Wow Mom Kenya’s policy brief, Childcare as an Economic Infrastructure: Unlocking Women’s Productivity in Urban Markets through Investments in Market-Based Childcare Services, advances an equally important argument: childcare should be treated as part of the infrastructure that makes urban economies function.

Markets are normally planned around trading spaces, roads, sanitation, water, storage, security and transport. Yet the care responsibilities of the women who sustain much of the informal urban economy are rarely considered within market design.

Evidence from Nairobi’s markets indicates that many women traders rely on unstable arrangements—including taking children to work, leaving them with relatives or using childcare services that may be unaffordable, inaccessible or inadequately regulated. Related research indicates that approximately 84 per cent of surveyed women traders relied on self-care arrangements for their children.

These arrangements affect the hours women can work, their concentration, mobility, productivity, income and ability to expand their enterprises. They also affect children’s safety, nutrition, development and wellbeing.

The policy implication is clear: childcare facilities should be planned and financed alongside other market infrastructure.

However, constructing childcare spaces will not be enough. A functioning system must also address:

• affordable fees and targeted subsidies for low-income parents;
• appropriate grants or financing for childcare providers;
• safe and accessible facilities;
• realistic caregiver-to-child ratios;
• training and professional development for care workers;
• registration, inspection and progressive licensing;
• child nutrition, health, safeguarding and early learning;
• services that respond to disability and different working hours; and
• reliable data for planning, monitoring and accountability.

This is particularly relevant to Kenya’s devolved system, where counties have substantial responsibilities for markets, ECDE, health, social services, spatial planning and local economic development.

Nairobi’s emerging market-based childcare approach could therefore inform a replicable county programme model. Other counties should not necessarily reproduce the same institutional arrangement, but they can apply the underlying principle: care services must be designed as part of economic and social infrastructure.

3. Women need economic ecosystems not isolated financial products

The third publication, BFA Global’s Five Domains: A Framework for Enabling Low-Income Women to Increase Their Incomes, draws on engagement with 11 enterprises in Kenya between 2023 and 2025.

It identifies five interconnected conditions for sustained income growth among low-income women:

Support structures and enabling conditions;

Skills and confidence;

Networks;

Productive capital and assets; and

Market linkages.

This framework challenges a persistent weakness in women’s economic empowerment programming: the tendency to offer one intervention- usually credit, training or market access, and expect it to overcome multiple structural barriers.

Finance is important, but finance alone cannot compensate for time poverty, inadequate childcare, discriminatory social norms, limited mobility, weak business networks or exposure to shocks. Similarly, training will produce limited results if women cannot access productive assets or viable markets.

The framework is especially valuable because it places support structures at the centre of economic participation. These include childcare, women’s control over time, household and community norms, social protection and access to essential services.

Care is therefore not peripheral to women’s enterprise development. It determines whether women can attend training, operate businesses consistently, travel to markets, adopt new technologies and take advantage of financial opportunities.

The framework could be used to assess Kenya’s affirmative-action funds, financial-inclusion initiatives, agricultural programmes and support for women-owned childcare enterprises. Funders could also use it to examine whether proposed WEE programmes address the connected barriers facing women or simply add another isolated product to an already fragmented ecosystem.

Implementation must become systemic

Although the three publications address different policy areas, they converge around one central message.

Women’s economic mobility requires systems.

It requires public budgets that translate gender and care commitments into funded programmes. It requires cities and counties that recognize childcare as essential infrastructure. It requires enterprise interventions that address women’s time, capabilities, networks, assets, markets and resilience together.

Kenya has already made important progress in developing national policies and producing evidence on unpaid care, childcare and women’s economic participation. The next phase should concentrate on institutionalization.

This includes costing the National Care Policy, establishing coordination and accountability mechanisms, developing county care programmes, embedding gender and care indicators within public-finance systems, and creating investment models that mobilize public, private and development finance.

The policy question is no longer whether care matters to the economy. The evidence is overwhelming that it does.

The question now is whether governments, businesses, funders and development partners are prepared to finance and build the systems that enable care, women’s economic participation and human wellbeing to reinforce one another.

Priority reading

• Gender Responsive Budgeting in Rwanda: Case Study — PEFA Secretariat
• Childcare as an Economic Infrastructure — Wow Mom Kenya

 Five Domains: A Framework for Enabling Low-Income Women to Increase Their Incomes — BFA Global