Summary:
- Unpaid care work is more than a social challenge; it represents a significant economic opportunity.
- In Nigeria, expanding access to quality childcare could enable more women to participate in paid work while creating new pathways to employment and entrepreneurship.
- Market-creating innovations could help address nonconsumption on both sides of the care economy by connecting families who lack accessible, affordable childcare with informal caregivers who lack the training, financing, and infrastructure to build sustainable businesses.
When I think about work, I typically think about my job: the nine-to-five, the work that I am compensated for. I think less often about the care work that happens at home. That work tends to be invisible and unpaid. Not only in my home, community, or country, but across the globe.
Millions of people, women in particular, cook, clean, supervise children, and care for relatives, but this labor rarely appears as employment. At the same time, these same responsibilities can prevent caregivers from entering paid employment themselves. In Nigeria, women spend five times as much time as men on unpaid care and domestic work, and insufficient childcare is estimated to cost the country 1.09% of GDP in lost labor and constrained female participation.
What if instead of seeing this struggle only as a social challenge, we also saw it as an opportunity for market-creating innovations?
Demand for childcare exists, caregivers exist, what’s missing is an accessible, trusted, financeable market that connects the two.
The care economy
Creating an economy from unpaid care work isn’t a new idea, but it has been recently and increasingly highlighted as a development opportunity for Nigeria by the United Nations, the World Bank, and even the federal government.
Perhaps this is because the opportunity is significant. 2026 research estimates that accessible, quality childcare could enable 1.7 million additional Nigerian mothers to enter the workforce by 2030, and that more broadly the care economy could support up to 17 million jobs in the country.
Market-creating innovations transform complicated and expensive products and services into ones that are simple and affordable enough for many more people to access them. They therefore begin with nonconsumption and the nonconsumers: people who would benefit from a product or service but are unable to access it.
Nigeria’s care economy reveals nonconsumption on both sides of the market.
On the demand side are parents who need childcare but can’t access something affordable, convenient, trustworthy, or appropriate enough to use. Their workaround may be unpaid family care, or simply reducing or foregoing paid work altogether.
On the supply side is another form of nonconsumption: the informal caregivers without access to the training, certification, financing, and business infrastructure that could transform the work they already do into a profitable enterprise.
A market-creating approach would potentially connect the two.
An informal caregiver, for example, could receive training and certification to become the licensed owner of a neighborhood care enterprise. Standardized safety and learning practices could build trust, while pooled purchasing could lower the cost of food and other required materials. Predictable enrollment and documented revenue could eventually make the business more financeable, allowing successful caregivers to hire employees and even expand to additional locations. The opportunity may not be limited to local nonconsumption either. Ageing populations in wealthier economies are increasing demand for care workers, creating the possibility that a system built to train and professionalize Nigerian caregivers could eventually serve unmet demand both at home and abroad.
Elements of this approach have already found success elsewhere.
The “mamapreneur” model
In Kenya, social enterprise Kidogo works with women running informal childcare businesses through its “mamapreneur” model. Through training, mentorship, quality standards, and business support, the model helps existing caregivers improve both the quality of care they provide and the viability of their businesses. This model has been so successful that today over 1,500 franchised Mamapreneurs serve nearly 40,000 children daily, 92% of children meet developmental milestones, and Mamapreneurs increase their income by up to 2X.
But professionalization alone isn’t enough to create a sustainable market and neither is demand by itself. Someone ultimately has to pay.
For many low income households, childcare may remain unaffordable even when delivered more efficiently which makes the business model as important as the service itself. Employers, market associations, governments, or other aggregators could help anchor demand through co-payments or childcare benefits. Employers, in particular, have an economic incentive: access to childcare can reduce absenteeism and help workers remain in the labor force.
For a market-creating innovation to last, the goal should be a sustainable revenue model rather than perpetual dependence on donor funding. And that requires us to reconsider what care work actually is.
If childcare determines whether millions of people can participate in productive and profitable economic activity, perhaps we need to stop treating it solely as a social benefit and start treating it as economic infrastructure. Investing in that infrastructure would create progress twice: for the parent consuming care, who gains time to pursue paid work, and for the woman providing it, who gains a pathway from informal labor to ownership of an income-generating enterprise.
Care work may already be happening everywhere, but the market-creation opportunity is to make that work accessible, productive, and valuable to the people on both sides of it.
