Coaching for Women’s Livelihoods, Children’s Learning, and Systemic Change
Childhood Education International (CE International) partnered with Trickle Up – a global organization dedicated to partnering with women in extreme poverty to build economic opportunity and drive inclusion – to design a global coaching curriculum and a mobile coaching application that scale women’s economic empowerment—and, in turn, strengthen young children’s care, early learning, and well-being. Trickle Up’s model works with women living in extreme poverty; CE International’s role was to codify that know-how into adaptable, user-friendly tools that frontline coaches and program teams can deploy across Central America, Africa, and South Asia.
Why This Matters for ECCE
When women can access decent work and reliable childcare, children benefit: attendance and learning improve, and caregiving burdens ease. Recent evidence from Latin America shows that expanding access to quality care services increases women’s labor-force participation—for example, Mexico’s expansion for mothers of children 0–3 raised participation from 35% to 40%. Inter-American Development Bank Broader regional analyses confirm the pattern: more and better childcare boosts women’s employment, especially where baseline access is low, and helps reallocate time toward income generation and child investments. IDB Publications Global reviews also find that investing in early childhood services improves children’s schooling outcomes while reducing caregiving constraints on families—key for the poorest households. UNICEF
What CE International Delivered
- A modular global coaching curriculum that standardizes best practices in financial inclusion, livelihoods, and goal-setting—while integrating caregiving, child development, and inclusive practices as core coaching threads.
- A mobile coaching app (content architecture, UX guidance, and content revisions) that enables low-connectivity use, micro-learning, progress tracking, and two-way feedback—so programs can monitor coaching quality at scale.
- Adaptation pathways and facilitator guides that local teams can tailor to language, literacy, and cultural norms, ensuring the curriculum is equitable, accessible, and sustainable across geographies.
Capacity Building for Large-scale Systems Change
This was not a one-off training. CE International embedded professional learning and quality-assurance mechanisms—competency rubrics for coaches, observation checklists, simple outcome dashboards, and iterative improvement cycles—so Trickle Up and partners can continuously upgrade delivery quality as programs expand. The result is a repeatable, data-informed coaching system that strengthens women’s incomes and resilience while reinforcing children’s early learning, safety, and care within the household.
The Bigger Economic Case
Closing gender gaps in work delivers outsized social returns; analyses in Latin America, for instance, estimate that removing barriers to women’s full participation could yield double-digit GDP gains—a macro signal that investments in women’s employment and care systems are growth-positive and child-positive. IDB Publications
Bottom line: By uniting livelihoods coaching with ECCE-aware design and rigorous QA, CE International helped Trickle Up move from effective projects to a scalable platform—advancing women’s economic empowerment and children’s early development together.
