She rises early in the morning. Packs a small tiffin. Gives her child one final look, as its tiny chest rises and falls. Then she closes the door and goes to work with two things on her mind: The joy of making a day’s living, and the silent terror of a day without. This is the day-to-day emotional calculus of thousands of mothers in low-income urban settlements.
A midline analysis conducted by various Brac institutes perfectly captures this complex reality. For those of us who work in these communities, that complexity is what commands our attention. This picture is not unique to Bangladesh and has been documented across South and Southeast Asia.
The economics of getting back to work
Women’s labour force participation in low-income urban Bangladesh is high, approximately 58% in informal settlements, out of a sheer need to make ends meet. For most women featured in the study, paid employment is itself a form of caregiving, an investment in their family’s future.
But childcare is where they hit the wall. In low-income urban Dhaka, only 12-15% of mothers have access to childcare when they need it. The grandmother-next-door solution is seldom available in communities built through migration, where kin networks have fragmented.
The outcome: Women accept lower-paying jobs closer to their homes, work fewer hours, or leave the labour force altogether when a child is born or falls ill.
To fill this gap, under the home-based childcare model, a trained local woman (a khala) cares for a small group of children in her own home. And the midline evidence suggests it works, at least along the most immediately measurable economic dimension.
Among mothers using childcare services, the evaluation finds approximately 3.5 additional hours per day devoted to earning activities. For mothers already in the labour force at baseline, the effect is even sharper: Nearly 9.5 additional hours per day and income gains of over Tk16,000. For these low-income households, these are not small gains.
The data reveals something else
The midline analysis indicates a slight yet significant increase in psychological distress among mothers who received cash transfers, alongside the positive economic indicators.
Scores on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), a widely used measure of psychological distress on a range of 10 to 50, where higher scores indicate greater distress, rose by approximately one point among mothers in the cash transfer arm. The increase is modest but statistically significant.
Distress stems not from the burden of childcare, but from the pressure of re-entering work. The rise in distress is concentrated among mothers who were not employed at baseline: Women searching for jobs, juggling both a job and a household, and the anxiety of leaving their child with someone for the first time.
A woman re-entering the workplace after years at home has more on her mind than finding a job. All the while she keeps wondering: Is the khala paying attention to my child? Did my child eat? Does the alley door lock?
Trust is the real infrastructure
This is more than just training childcare entrepreneurs in play-based pedagogy. It creates trust structurally: Through the khalabeing a known face in the community, routine home visits by Brac staff, and an explicit focus on parental involvement and interaction.
The midline data confirms this. Among service users, 61% reported that the caregiver treats children like her own, compared to 41% among non-users, making users 1.5 times more likely to hold this perception.
Most mothers who enrolled for the service kept using it. And promisingly, 95% of trained entrepreneurs continued operating even after subsidies ended, collecting fees at the market rate.
However, in low-income settlements, many home-based care setups are crowded, with little separation between cooking and play areas, and open drains nearby. Thus, the question on a mother’s mind: Will my child be safe here for the next six to eight hours?
What the numbers cannot capture
Quantitative evaluations are good at measuring work hours, income, and changes in time use. What they cannot capture is the inner life of a working mother: The pride she takes in being handed her wages at the end of the month, and the guilt she feels in not being able to comfort her child when it cries.
The project treats psychosocial well-being as a core concern, recognizing that the quality of care depends on the emotional state of the person providing it. A stressed and under-supported khala is unlikely to create the warm, stimulating environment that children need. This is what the project’s caregiver mental health training reflects.
The same argument should apply to mothers, and it is long overdue in how we debate childcare policy in Bangladesh. A mother’s freedom to work does not just depend on the existence of childcare, but on whether she genuinely believes that her child is safe and cared for in her absence. A placement slot does not create that confidence. It is built through familiarity, ensuring quality, and the gradual accumulation of good days.
The Labour Act of Bangladesh requires childcare to be provided at organizational workplaces employing 40 or more women. However, the mothers most constrained by a lack of childcare are not employed at such establishments. They are domestic workers, subcontracted garment workers, hawkers, and daily labourers. For them, the law is often elusive.
Home- and community-based care models are thus not the second-best solution. They are usually the sole viable alternative for the neediest and economically vulnerable mothers in urban Bangladesh.
“Community-based care” is not synonymous with unregulated care. Home-based care can be professionalized, quality-assured, and financially viable when the enabling conditions are carefully designed.
So, what would a national childcare policy that takes these women into account look like?
It would invest in training and continued support for community caregivers as professionals and set enforceable standards for home care environments.
It would combine this with financial access mechanisms -- subsidies, transfers, or employer contributions -- lowering the cost barrier to build maternal confidence in childcare systems.
The results of the project’s midline survey do not claim to have solved these issues and the endline analysis will tell us much more about child development outcomes, the longer-term consequences on the workforce, and the sustainability of the businesses the khalas have created.
Yet already, the story is instructive: Childcare works. And it is, necessarily, complicated. Designing around that complexity is what separates a childcare program from a childcare system.
Mashiat Noor Prapti is a Senior Research Associate at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University, under the Gender and Social Development Cluster.