Health
At IWWAGE, we recognise that women’s health and economic empowerment are deeply interconnected. Access to quality, affordable healthcare is essential for women to enter, remain in, and progress in the workforce. Improved health outcomes strengthen women’s economic participation, while greater economic agency enables better health, creating a reinforcing cycle of empowerment.
IWWAGE’s work on women’s health focuses on:
Linking health and economic participation
Examining how health outcomes influence women’s ability to participate, retain, and advance in paid work across sectors and life stages.
Improving measurement and visibility of women’s work
Bringing attention to under-recognised areas such as menstrual and menopausal health, and their implications for productivity, dignity, and long-term labour market engagement.
Identifying systemic barriers and enablers
Analysing how health systems, workplace practices, and social norms shape women’s access to care and health-related decision-making.
Integrating health into economic and workplace policy
Advocating for the inclusion of women’s health needs within labour, social protection, and workplace policies to support sustained economic empowerment.
Through this work, IWWAGE positions women’s health as a strategic lever for inclusive growth, ensuring that women’s health needs are visible, valued, and embedded within broader economic and social policy agendas.
Working Paper
Public Provision of Centre-based Childcare in High, Middle & Low-Income Countries
- April , 2019
- Surabhi Chaturvedi
This paper “Public provision of centre-based childcare in high-, middle- and low-income countries: What are the systemic features that aided the effective scale up of these programmes? highlights that the provision of public childcare sits in a large complex adaptive system made of building blocks, such as governance/accountability, financing, scope of the programme, human resources for childcare, data systems, evaluation, costing and impact, and social norms, that need to work in cohesion to ensure a positive impact on two outcomes: maternal employment and early childhood development in large-scale programmes. The main contribution of this paper is to focus, in a comparative study format, on the systemic features that have allowed low- and middle-income countries to implement and iteratively scale up centre-based childcare programmes. This is supported by examples from countries which were cognizant of this complex adaptive systemic thinking, and iteratively scaled up programmes, achieving a positive impact on the two outcomes mentioned above. This paper also documents examples of small-scale, alternate/non-government models of affordable, quality centre-based childcare in India that support working mothers. The intention is to show the feasibility of adoption of the systemic thinking to deliver quality service in India.
This paper “Public provision of centre-based childcare in high-, middle- and low-income countries: What are the systemic features that aided the effective scale up of these programmes? highlights that the provision of public childcare sits in a large complex adaptive system made of building blocks, such as governance/accountability, financing, scope of the programme, human resources for childcare, data systems, evaluation, costing and impact, and social norms, that need to work in cohesion to ensure a positive impact on two outcomes: maternal employment and early childhood development in large-scale programmes. The main contribution of this paper is to focus, in a comparative study format, on the systemic features that have allowed low- and middle-income countries to implement and iteratively scale up centre-based childcare programmes. This is supported by examples from countries which were cognizant of this complex adaptive systemic thinking, and iteratively scaled up programmes, achieving a positive impact on the two outcomes mentioned above. This paper also documents examples of small-scale, alternate/non-government models of affordable, quality centre-based childcare in India that support working mothers. The intention is to show the feasibility of adoption of the systemic thinking to deliver quality service in India.
Working Paper
Social Safety Net for Maternity Protection and Early Childhood Development in India
- April , 2019
- Surabhi Chaturvedi
This paper analyses the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) system (its historical evolution and current form) and other policies that are intended to provide maternity support and early childhood development. In light of the learnings from the second paper, this paper attempts a gap analysis of the ICDS system capacity and design to reach the intended beneficiary. It highlights the fact that in an effort to provide integrated services, vertical programmes attempt to deliver their interventions using the common platform of ICDS, without accurately assessing the capacity or design of these platforms. Often the layering of additional inputs onto these platforms causes the system to overload, resulting in diminishing returns or exacerbating the negative feedback loops. Moreover, human resources for childcare is one of the key features that influences the quality of the childcare centres. This paper includes findings from a qualitative field study on insights on human resources motivations and non-monetary incentives that influence their performance and productivity. This is accompanied by articulation of potential research questions and some next steps to further the agenda of early childhood development and maternity support.
This paper analyses the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) system (its historical evolution and current form) and other policies that are intended to provide maternity support and early childhood development. In light of the learnings from the second paper, this paper attempts a gap analysis of the ICDS system capacity and design to reach the intended beneficiary. It highlights the fact that in an effort to provide integrated services, vertical programmes attempt to deliver their interventions using the common platform of ICDS, without accurately assessing the capacity or design of these platforms. Often the layering of additional inputs onto these platforms causes the system to overload, resulting in diminishing returns or exacerbating the negative feedback loops. Moreover, human resources for childcare is one of the key features that influences the quality of the childcare centres. This paper includes findings from a qualitative field study on insights on human resources motivations and non-monetary incentives that influence their performance and productivity. This is accompanied by articulation of potential research questions and some next steps to further the agenda of early childhood development and maternity support.
Brief
A Crisis in Care India’s Ageing Population and the Need for Strengthened Eldercare – Hindi
- January , 2019