Access to affordable daycare and women’s economic opportunities: evidence from a cluster-randomised intervention in India

ABSTRACT

We used data from a cluster-randomized trial in rural Rajasthan, India to evaluate the impact of providing access to a community-based daycare program on women’s economic outcomes two years later. The sample included 2858 mothers with age-eligible children. Providing access to daycare led 43% of households to utilize them. The intervention reduced time on childcare by 16.0 minutes/day (95%CI=-10.6, 42.5) and increased the probabilities that women were paid in cash and spent time during the prior day on paid work by 2.3 (95%CI=0.0, 4.5) and 2.6 (95%CI=0.9, 4.4) percentage points. Other indicators of labor force participation and income were unaffected.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• daycare
• time use
• employment
• economic opportunity
• cluster-randomised trial

Availability of data and material

The data collected as part of this ongoing trial will be made available at the end of the study, after all data have been collected and cleaned.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Declarations

Trial registration

The trial is registered through: (1) the ISRCTN clinical trial registry (ISRCTN45369145), http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN45369145, registered on 16 May 2016 and (2) the American Economic Association’s (AEA) registry for randomized controlled trials (AEARCTR-0000774), http://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/774, registered on 15 July 2015. A pre-analysis plan is included in the AEA registration of the trial.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The Institutional Review Board of McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine and the Human Subjects Committee of the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai, India approved this study. Potential respondents were given the opportunity to refuse or consent to participation in the study. After describing the study objectives, procedures, potential risks, potential benefits, voluntary nature, confidentiality and privacy protections, and compensation, each eligible respondent was asked if they would consent to participate. This was done in written form for respondents who could read and write and orally for those who could not.

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was carried out with financial support from the UK Government’s Department of International Development (DFID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada; [107819-001]. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of DFID or IDRC.

Notes on contributors

Arijit Nandi

Arijit Nandi is an Associate Professor, jointly appointed at the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University. A former Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, Arijit received a PhD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is generally interested in the understanding the effects of programs and policies on health and health inequalities in a global context using experimental and quasi-experimental approaches.

Parul Agarwal

Parul Agarwal is a development professional with over a decade of experience in measurement and evaluation. She has managed multiple evaluations including experimental and non-experimental studies. Her key areas of interest include product innovation for low income households, financial behavior and labor mobility. She is a graduate in Economics from University of Delhi, India and has done a Master's course in Rural Management from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, India.

Anoushaka Chandrashekar

Anoushaka is a development sector professional with a strong foundation in research and evaluation design. She currently works as a Project Manager with LEAD at Krea University, managing research projects on women collectives and agriculture. She has over 5 years of experience in stakeholder management, data collection, and data cleaning and analysis, in India. Anoushaka holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from The University of Texas at Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University.

Sam Harper

Sam Harper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University. He received his training in epidemiology from the University of Michigan. He was previously a fellow at the US National Center for Health Statistics, and did post-doctoral training in epidemiology at McGill. His research focuses on understanding population health and its social distribution, with specific interests in evidence construction, measuring health inequalities, global health, demography, cancer epidemiology, causal inference, and ethical issues in public health.