Impact Evaluation of Community-Based Childcare in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program 2020: Baseline (Ethiopia)

Abstract

Women often bear a greater responsibility for childcare than men, and this responsibility has broad implications for women’s economic empowerment. In collaboration with Child Fund, the Africa Gender Innovation Lab, and the Food Security Directorate (FSD) of the Ministry of Agriculture with financial support from the World Bank’s Early Life Partnerships, the PSNP designed a pilot that would establish childcare centers in six woredas in the Northern part of the Amhara region. The pilot aims to ease labor constraints for women and improve children’s cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical development through early stimulation and early learning. The childcare pilot was implemented in 90 kebeles across the six project woredas that were eligible to receive the childcare centers. These kebeles were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a treatment group that would receive a childcare center and a control group that would not receive a childcare center. The control group serves as a counterfactual to measure the impacts of childcare centers. The evaluation also aims to measure the impact of access to childcare on non-PSNP households by inviting randomly selected, eligible, non-PSNP households to access the childcare centers. The selection of non-PSNP households to access the program is with the goal of promoting childcare as a public good of the PSNP and enabling more women to undertake income-generating activities.