public works project focused on enrolling participants from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, so the childcare intervention could potentially promote equitable childcare access by benefiting disadvantaged children and their families.

We find that 25% of eligible women take up the opportunity to use the childcare centers. This translates to tripling the use of any childcare centers for children aged 0 to 6 over our evaluation period. These effects are persistent and extend beyond use during the public works program, with higher rates of childcare usage over the past 24 hours during the follow up survey 14 months later, which suggests that initial exposure to the childcare centers generates lasting demand. For women, we find improved employment outcomes, which are most robust for women with children aged 0 to 2 and concentrated in increases in salaried work. Additionally, we find positive effects on selfreported psychological well-being (although, this result is less robust to attrition correction) and financial resilience and savings. However, we find no significant changes in women’s participation in decision-making, their gender attitudes, nor the intrahousehold division of childcare and household tasks. For children, we find improved development scores, driven by improvements in gross and fine motor skills. We do not find any improvements, nor deterioration, in children’s language skills. Our estimates likely constitute a lower bound for the effects of providing access to childcare centers, as the COVID-19 pandemic reduced households’ exposure to the intervention.<sup>1</sup> Our work makes three contributions to the literature. First, we present rigorous evidence on the effects of a community-based childcare model in a developing economy. Although substantial evidence demonstrates that childcare responsibilities limit women’s earnings, how to deliver accessible care for young children while ensuring that they receive sufficient stimulation remains an open question. We estimate the impacts of an innovative model of providing affordable access to childcare by trained providers.<sup>2</sup> Several studies have found null or negative impacts of center-based

> 1In addition to disrupting operation of the childcare centers, the pandemic also reduced employment opportunities. Analyses from the first round of a nationally representative High Frequency Phone Survey (HFPS) of households conducted in June 2020 by the Burkina Faso National Institute of Statistics and Demography with technical and financial assistance of the World Bank found that around 10% of respondents who used to work before the COVID19 outbreak were not working at the time of the survey, and that the COVID-19 related economic slowdown has translated in a reduction of income for most employees, non-farm business owners as well as farmers (Nkengne et al., 2020).

> 2Similar mobile childcare interventions exist in other countries, notably the Mobile Creches NGO in India has been operating mobile childcare centers alongside construction sites in urban areas for the past 50 years, but the best existing quantitative evidence on effects of access to these facilities comes from a comparison of children who attended childcare centers for less than a month to those who attended for a full six months, in the same public works site (Creches, 2012). Without an explicitly-designed comparison group, it is difficult to know whether differences in observed outcomes truly reflect the causal effects of access to childcare centers or partly result from preexisting

3