Regional Insights on the Care Economy: Childcare

Introduction

Despite the declining fertility rate seen worldwide, the issue of childcare still remains, particularly since family structures are becoming more independent units. With many parents chasing economic opportunities and lacking community support to raise children, childcare services are in demand.

This Regional Insights on the Care Economy series will outline how other countries in the region are tackling the varying needs in their care economies. Specifically for this article, we will dive into childcare is provided in Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam¹. This will allow for a comparison with Malaysia’s own initiatives².

Looking at Childcare

As detailed in Regional Insights on the Care Economy: Aged Care and summarised in Table 1, Indonesia and Vietnam face a higher demand for childcare services. This is because a relatively large proportion of their population is of younger age and many of those of working age are working in foreign countries as domestic help. On the other hand, Singapore has a significantly lower number of children, thus a lesser need for childcare although the government has placed particular focus on early childhood education. These contextual differences would have an impact on the strategies and initiatives taken by each country as seen below.

Table 1: Proportion of children to population, 2022

Childcare provision

Indonesia has had more decentralised childcare provisions relying heavily on family or informal care arrangements, leading to inequity in access to and quality of childcare services across the country³. According to a World Bank report in 2022, although the Indonesian government has started several projects to expand childcare services to rural and disadvantaged areas⁴, priority has been mainly towards provision of care for children aged between four to six. These projects utilise tools such as community grants, teacher training and awareness campaigns to expand both private and public provision⁵.

For those below four years old, services are mostly non-formal, focusing on child development through playgroups, childcare services for working parents and child development programmes⁶. However, Taman Peniitipan Anak (TPA) that are available for children from 3 months to six years old during working hours are relatively few in number. In 2021, providers of this type of service made up only 13.2% of all early childhood and development providers, meaning in most cases childcare may still be a burden for working parents⁷.  Indonesia also made plans to direct further funding into early childcare and education as seen in the recent 2024 Road Map on the Care Economy⁸, following on from the 2011–2015 childcare expansion goals by the Ministry of Education⁹.

Singapore has a highly privatised formal childcare market with 1,971 centres, only 56 of which are run by the Ministry of Education as at 2025¹⁰. This number includes childcare centres, early years centres and kindergartens. Only childcare centres and early years centres cater to children below four years of age although some kindergartens may begin taking on children from the age of three¹¹.

However, despite privatisation and despite preschool not being compulsory, they have very high rates of enrolment. This privatised market for education has lent itself to issues with ensuring quality and affordability, so the government of Singapore has made several efforts in recent years to address these disparities. In 2021, the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) has given subsidies to low-income families and to 324 childcare centres serving them¹². Additionally, in 2016 the government stated plans to create more state-supported preschools to serve disadvantaged families¹³.

Fewer publications were found on the Vietnamese childcare landscape compared to Indonesia and Singapore. Although Vietnam’s compulsory early education for 5-year-olds under the Education Law of 2005 raised enrolment to essentially 100%¹⁴, enrolment for children below this age remains low. A 2016 UNICEF paper reported that public childcare facilities were insufficient for those aged three and below whereas, private childcare centres faced issues of affordability and standard quality¹⁵.

Projects to expand childcare in Vietnam have included the 2010 UNICEF Integrated Early Childhood Development (IECD) programme in three provinces¹⁶ to promote holistic parenting from conception to eight years of age and the revised Innovation Program 2017, which is a programme originally started in 1998 in Vietnam kindergartens providing an integrated child-centric teaching approach to improve the quality of early childhood education¹⁷. The Early Childhood Education Development project plan for 2018–2025 was signed by the Prime Minister¹⁸, indicating Vietnam’s efforts to direct more funding into childcare expansion. However, these projects appear to have been developed prior to the pandemic with no new published developments.  

Affordability and Quality Issues

Even though early education, which includes childcare for those under 4 years old, is partially state-subsidised in Indonesia, there are still significant regional and income-based disparities in accessibility to early education and care services. According to the World Bank, “close to 52% of children in the lowest income quintile do not attend any form of pre-primary education”¹⁹.  

Meanwhile in Singapore, due to a lack of regulation, quality and price vary greatly across early education providers²⁰. In addition to unequal access to early education and care, some families have also been put on waiting lists for up to 12 months to enrol their children in pre-primary education in Punggol and Sengkang²¹. Although the Singaporean government has made efforts to double the number of pre-school places over the last ten years and increase the number of government-supported pre-schools, these would still not cater to children under the age of 3.  

In Vietnam, it was reported in 2023 that although the government has been pushing for more childcare centres to accept children in younger age groups, due to capacity limitations, only a few cities were able to comply²². This issue is further compounded by the fact that affordable public centres have a high demand that outpaces supply²³.

Beyond the provision of childcare, it is important to assess whether the care provided is of high quality. To address quality disparaties in Indonesia, the Board of National Education Standards established national quality standards for early childcare in 2009, and Indonesia’s first childcare census began collecting data in 2011²⁴.

Singapore’s government has tried yearly awards to early education educators to incentivise higher teaching quality, but this was said to be ineffective in practice. To standardise quality, the Singapore government has certified 50% of preschools by a national quality measure by 2020 and invested USD 13 million over the past six years in training early childcare educators by 2022²⁵. For Vietnam, the most recent available data from a 2017 study shows that there was an increase in the number of preschools achieving the national standard from 5,079 to 5,710²⁶. However, for rural areas in particular, issues of lack of supervision from governing bodies have been cited²⁷. These quality standards are also more focused on pre-primary education rather than quality of caregiving for young children.

Parental Leave Policies

To further alleviate childcare burden for working parents, these countries have implemented paid parental leave policies. These efforts have been summarised in Table 1.

Table 1: Summary of policies on parental leave

Indonesia raised their paid maternity and paternity leave in 2024 to three months and two days respectively, with extensions granted for medical reasons²⁸. Singapore has a similar length of paid maternity leave at 12 or 16 weeks, depending on a set of criteria such as the mother’s and child’s citizenship²⁹. Singapore also has the longest paid paternity leave of these countries, at 2-4 weeks long³⁰. Vietnam mandated paternity leave in 2016 and expanded paid maternity leave and enforcement through the 2019 Labour Code³¹.  

Legally enforced maternity leave is typically viewed as a way to boost workforce participation among women and is considered quite substantial across these countries. Unfortunately, there is still a gap in promoting the equal distribution of caregiving duties, as seen through Indonesia and Vietnam’s paternity leave policies. Whilst Singapore reported that 56% of fathers took up their paternity leave in 2023³², this is not the case in Vietnam or Indonesia.

In Vietnam, despite there being a mandate, paid paternity leave is only available to working fathers contributing to the Social Insurance Fund³³, making this paid leave inaccessible to the many informal workers in the country. In Indonesia, whilst all male employees are eligible, paternity leave is still relatively short, which may render it insignificant in promoting paternal involvement in childcare. The provision for extension is also unclear as the qualifying medical reasons are not specified³⁴. There is also a lack of data on the take-up rates of maternity and paternity leave in these countries.  

Looking at Malaysia

In context, alongside a similar demand to Indonesia and Vietnam, Malaysia’s childcare ecosystem is well developed. However, similar to Singapore, Malaysian childcare providers are mainly from the private sector. Government provision of childcare has more focus on those of preschool age.  This poses issues of high cost as well as a lack of standardisation across individual providers. Previous studies have also shown a preference for informal childcare provisions in Malaysia, including care provided by family members or babysitters³⁵.

For parental leave, maternity leave in Malaysia was extended from 60 days to 98 days and paternity leave was increased from three to seven days in 2023. Take-up of paternity leave has been reported to be quite positive, with a report by the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) showing that both executives and non-executives take an average of 5.0 and 5.3 days per employee respectively. However, the average number of paid maternity leave taken in 2024 was found to be only 53.3 days per employee despite the extension granted³⁶.

Conclusion

Overall, all three countries have made efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of childcare facilities. While Indonesia and Vietnam rely on public infrastructure to deliver childcare services, Singapore has developed a highly privatised market. With rapid urbanisation and evolving gender roles in the country, there is a need to ensure that Malaysia’s care infrastructure can keep up. Working parents should have access to affordable, well-governed and high-quality care while children deserve to be raised in a nurturing and safe environment.

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