In the markets, small workshops and trading streets of West Africa, millions of women engage every day in economic activity without which their households could not survive. They are vendors, artisans, food processors. They form the backbone of the informal sector. And every morning, before they begin work, they face a question that public policy has yet to resolve: who will look after their children?
An Institutional Void with Systemic Consequences
Public childcare arrangements have been designed for a profile of worker that does not reflect the majority: regular hours, stable income, capacity for monthly payment. For informal workers, whose earnings fluctuate with market days and seasons, these arrangements are structurally out of reach.
In the absence of alternatives, makeshift solutions prevail: children carried on their mothers' backs during transactions, left with a neighbour, an older female relative, sometimes a girl barely older than the child herself. These arrangements are not without consequence. They expose young children to insufficiently protective environments during the years most critical for cognitive and emotional development. They force mothers into a constant trade-off between being present for their children and maintaining their income. And they fuel a dynamic in which economic precarity and family vulnerability reinforce one another.
This is not inevitable. It is the measurable result of a blind spot in social policy.
A Question of Gender Equity
Childcare is often treated as a child protection issue. It is also, fundamentally, a question of gender equity.
As long as the responsibility for childcare falls exclusively on mothers, without adequate institutional support, economic equality between women and men remains out of reach. Informal workers cannot fully develop their businesses, accumulate capital, access training or participate in professional organisations if part of their energy and time is constantly absorbed by a challenge that public policy could have addressed.
Investing in childcare solutions adapted to the informal sector means investing in women's economic capacity. It means acknowledging that women's economic empowerment cannot advance without removing the structural constraints that hold it back.
What Field Experience Demonstrates
To respond to this reality, the African Center for Equitable Development designed a childcare model tailored to the constraints of informal sector workers: flexible in its hours, rooted in local communities, and managed by the beneficiaries themselves.
In September and November 2025, the first Community Childcare Spaces (ECGEs) opened in Tchatchégou and Ouidah, in Benin. From the very first day, the results spoke for themselves: mothers working without the anxiety of knowing their children are poorly cared for, children welcomed into a structured and nurturing environment, communities taking ownership of a model whose governance rules they themselves defined.
These pilot sites are a knowledge production tool. Every piece of data collected, on attendance, regularity of children's presence, and effects on mothers' economic activity, contributes to building a public policy grounded in documented realities.
From Experimentation to Public Policy: The Missing Link
Benin does not yet have a policy framework specifically designed for childcare in the informal sector. This gap is shared by the vast majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Bridging it requires three conditions. First, rigorous knowledge about what works, in which contexts and under what conditions: this is the purpose of the pilot phase currently under way. Second, decision-makers willing to translate that knowledge into concrete policy directions: minimum standards, financing mechanisms, articulation with existing social protection systems. Third, technical and financial partners ready to support the transition from experimentation to institutionalisation.
It is precisely at this junction between knowledge and decision-making that ACED situates its work. Because lasting improvement in the lives of women and children depends on better-informed, more inclusive public policies, capable of responding to the realities of those they are meant to serve.
