Nonye Afagwu spent years working as a nurse in a school, caring for other people’s children while knowing, as any parent does, how hard it is to find someone you trust to care for your own. When she attended a “Women, Jobs, and Markets in Nigeria” Evidence Forum, organized by the World Bank Group in April 2025, it dawned on her that childcare could also be a business opportunity. By September 2025, Nonye had set up her own childcare center.
“Just from that convening,” says Adaorie Udechukwu, International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Program Lead behind the Care Works program in Nigeria, “we birthed one job that’s going to hire more women. Imagine the ripple effect when we train thousands.”
In Nigeria, only five percent of private sector employers invest in childcare and women spend up to six hours a day on unpaid care work. The World Bank Group is addressing these interconnected constraints by building a more accessible, professional, and investible childcare market.
Nigeria’s challenge is part of a global one. Around the world, an estimated 708 million women, compared with 40 million men, are out of the workforce because of care responsibilities. At the same time, nearly 350 million children below primary school age need childcare but do not have access to it.
The numbers make the case. In 2022, the World Bank estimated that closing the gender gap in key sectors of Nigeria’s economy could yield an economic gain of as much as $23 billion, or 6 percent of Nigeria’s overall GDP. Yet 76 percent of childcare entrepreneurs lack access to formal finance, and 92 percent of facilities are small, independently owned, and invisible to banks.
The childcare market is broken on multiple sides: entrepreneurs cannot get loans, parents cannot afford quality care, and workers lack credentials to prove their skills. Fixing one side in isolation does not work, which is why the initiative in Nigeria is, by design, a coordinated effort across the World Bank Group.
Nigeria is one of the countries where the World Bank Group is intentionally bringing public and private sector solutions together to advance gender equality as part of its 2024-2030 Gender Strategy. A grant from the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality (UFGE), a multi donor trust fund, provided the seed funding for teams to analyze what could do the most for women in Nigeria. Childcare topped the list.
The resulting IDEAS Project, supported by the World Bank, developed Nigeria’s first-ever National Occupational Standards for childcare, a baseline that had never existed before. Over 4,500 aspiring caregivers and entrepreneurs—about 90 percent of them women—are currently training towards those standards.
read more: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2026/10/29/nigeria-childcare-market-womens-jobs
