Cities that care: Incorporate caregiving infrastructure into urban planning

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Everyone needs care, but the care needs of some are particularly urgent, and this population is steadily rising. The elderly are projected to reach 158 million in 2025

(UNFPA). There are 158 million children under six (UNICEF), and about 40-90 million people with disabilities (World Bank).

The care of all these segments requires supportive physical and human infrastructure, as it depends on human skill and care-friendly environments at home and outside.

These services can help families secure supplementary care when needed, especially as women continue to be the primary caregivers (Time Use Survey 2025). Similarly, physical infrastructure for care affects how easily primary caregivers can manage their daily responsibilities for their dependents while participating in economic activities.

Let us choose the latter against the backdrop of childcare and women’s increasing participation in the labour force, which rose from 23% in 2018 to 37% in 2023. Since 2019, women’s care work has remained over 300 minutes daily, while paid work

increased by six minutes. Yet, India’s public and workplace infrastructure continues to take “care” for granted, assuming that the design of public spaces has no impact on it.

Unlike roads, railways and power grids designed to facilitate movement and commerce, the care infrastructure, including lactation rooms, changing stations and creches, remain inadequate or completely lacking in modern cities.

In metro stations, public parks, courts, police stations, marketplaces and most offices, this infrastructure is either non-existent or inadequate. Navigating streets, buses, railways and footpaths with strollers can be exhausting and impossible, with the hardships compounded for women with disabilities.

Despite accessibility features, the National Building Code lacks lactation rooms, rendering public infrastructure inconvenient and exclusionary to breastfeeding mothers returning to work. Without supportive environments, World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on breastfeeding are difficult to follow for mothers returning to work.

As high as 81% of mothers said they were uncomfortable feeding their children in public due to the lack of proper breastfeeding places. Only 6% of Indian mothers feel comfortable breastfeeding in public despite legal protections. Without safe and hygienic spaces, many are forced to skip feedings or use storage closets and public toilets, which are neither safe nor dignified options.

An IIT Delhi study found that young mothers with infants are the least mobile in India. These design gaps subtly shape who feels welcome in public spaces and potentially push many women out of the workforce after childbirth, thereby weakening India’s economic engine.

India must embed care infrastructure into city planning, workplace design and transportation networks. This requires institutionalizing a future-ready national care policy encompassing three key areas:

First, the National Guidelines that mandate lactation centres in health facilities must be extended to all public spaces, with standardized infrastructure like crèches, changing stations, incorporating safe and accessible design. This should be integrated into the National Building Code 2016.

Second, investments in human care infrastructure by professionalizing caregiving services and supporting women-led care enterprises.

Third, anchor these through a national care policy, linking care to labour, urban development and health, with adequate budgets and workplace protections. These should encourage affordable and high-quality care services from the private sector. Public campaigns normalizing male caregiving roles and reducing stigma around breastfeeding can strengthen care as a pillar of social equity and economic productivity.

Globally, countries are reimagining care and its supporting infrastructure. Spain and Colombia are integrating care into city planning. Singapore offers portable lactation pods that can be located and accessed through an app. The US has a legal requirement for lactation rooms, with reasonable lactation breaks for breastfeeding employees.

The UK offers up to £2,000 per child annually to help cover registered childcare expenses. Argentina offers childcare allowances for unemployed or informal workers and childcare in the workplace. Germany offers care insurance to cover the costs of long-term care services.

India has the opportunity to craft its unique state-led model rooted in scale, local context and inclusion of families from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. This will allow us to shape a future of work where women are no longer forced to choose between caregiving and economic participation, but are supported in doing both with dignity and freedom.

As Nancy Folbre reminds us, “The work of care is not just an obligation, it is a form of social wealth creation.” It is time we designed systems that recognize and reward this critical labour as foundational to a just and thriving economy.

This was first published in “Mint” on 4th July 2025.

The policy paradox at the heart of Bangladesh’s digital finance story

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Bangladesh Bank has mandated that 50% of agent-banking representatives must be women, while fewer than 3% of the country’s MFS agents, the channel that handles the lion’s share of daily cash-in, cash-out, remittance, and G2P transactions, are female.

Bangladesh stands at a critical inflection point in its digital financial services (DFS) journey. Agent banking and mobile financial services (MFS) have transformed the country’s financial landscape, taking formal transactions to millions of households and building one of the most extensive last-mile service architectures in South Asia.

Today, MFS channels  operate through over 1.5 million agents and support more than 200 million registered accounts, while agent banking has grown to over 16,000 agents and more than 21,000 outlets serving customers across all districts. Yet within this achievement lies a structural imbalance: Bangladesh Bank has mandated that 50% of agent-banking representatives must be women, while fewer than 3% of the country’s MFS agents, the channel that handles the lion’s share of daily cash-in, cash-out, remittance, and G2P transactions, are female.

This mismatch is more than policy oversight; it represents a deeper market design challenge. The gender mandate applies only to the smaller, slower-growing agent-banking channel, while the much larger MFS ecosystem remains almost entirely male. Women now hold 42% of the total 239.3 million registered MFS accounts, yet have almost no representation among the frontline providers who shape trust, privacy, grievance resolution, and usage. Representation at the last mile is not symbolic; it determines whether women can transact confidently and independently.

What appears to be a simple representation gap is, in reality, a question of whether the architecture of Bangladesh’s digital economy is built to recognise women as full economic actors. It echoes a broader global ambition to advance women’s empowerment, expand decent and dignified work, and strengthen inclusive, resilient digital infrastructure (SDG 5, SDG 8, SDG 9). And it raises a fundamental question: Can a digital economy be truly inclusive if women are consumers but not providers of financial services?

Why women agents matter 

The absence of women at the frontline reinforces gender gaps in trust, privacy, and confidence-patterns consistently observed in global evidence from India, Nigeria, and East Africa, as well as in recent women-led agent pilots in Bangladesh. Female agents build trust, improve customer retention, and help convert dormant or irregular women users into active ones, while reaching segments male agents often struggle to serve: young women, new mothers, informal entrepreneurs, and socially restricted female household members.

They also strengthen operational reliability, with lower churn and higher adherence to service standards, directly benefiting providers. Most importantly, women agents expand women’s economic agency, offering one of the most accessible pathways into formal entrepreneurship, digital capability, and income generation.

The constraint stack

Women’s exclusion from MFS agent networks is not driven by a lack of interest or capability; it stems from how the wider financial and retail ecosystem is structured. The MFS agent model in Bangladesh was built around male-owned retail shops, high-mobility cash cycles, and regulatory frameworks that do not monitor or incentivise gender-balanced networks. These sector wide design features interact with women’s lived realities-mobility constraints, discomfort in male-run environments, lower smartphone access, and household negotiations around public-facing work to produce a pipeline that few women can enter and even fewer can sustain. In effect, the system functions as if women were never intended to be agents.

The table that follows breaks these constraints down into the structural touchpoints where the exclusion becomes most visible:

Beyond the myths: Interrogating provider assumptions

Provider concerns about onboarding women agents: liquidity pressure, footfall, security risks, and training costs are rooted in practical realities. But these issues are not isolated barriers; they are symptoms of a wider lifecycle design that was built around male norms. At every stage of the agent journey i.e. selection, onboarding, training, day-to-day operations, and long-term sustainability, the system assumes a male agent: one with high mobility, ownership of formal retail space, access to documentation, and freedom to engage in public-facing commercial activity. When these assumptions go unquestioned, women appear “unsuitable,” when in reality the model itself is exclusionary.

The belief that “women don’t apply” simply mirrors limited entry pathways: providers recruit through male retail networks and offer training environments misaligned with women’s mobility and safety needs. Concerns about commercial viability assume that only market-center, high-footfall outlets are profitable; yet women-led outlets in community settings often deliver higher trust, deeper engagement, and lower churn, key drivers of sustainable profitability.

Liquidity challenges attributed to women arise from an operating model that depends on constant mobility. Once that model is adapted through micro-float credit lines, shared liquidity pools, or periodic cash-support women manage liquidity as effectively as men. And while onboarding women may require more tailored support at the outset, women agents consistently exhibit stronger compliance, lower misconduct, and greater operational stability, which reduce supervisory costs over time.

The evidence is consistent across markets: the perceived weaknesses of women agents are, in fact, weaknesses in a system that was never designed with women in mind. When the operating model shifts even slightly to reflect women’s realities, the business case strengthens rather than weakens.
Cross-country learning: What Bangladesh can actually borrow

Bangladesh is not alone in grappling with a stark gender gap in agent networks. Several countries have already experimented with ways to bring more women into frontline roles, and while contexts differ, three concrete lessons stand out from documented practice.

First, dedicated women-agent pipelines work when they are built through existing women’s networks.

In India’s BC Sakhi programme, state rural livelihood missions identify self-help group (SHG) members and train them as banking correspondents to serve their own communities. The “One Gram Panchayat, One BC Sakhi” mission in Uttar Pradesh has onboarded tens of thousands of women as village-level banking agents and channeled millions of transactions and significant commission income to them. This model shows that when recruitment is routed through women’s collectives, ot just existing retail shops, women agents emerge at scale and are able to serve as a trusted financial touchpoint in rural areas.

Second, access to working capital and liquidity support is a binding constraint but is a solvable problem.

Research on female cash-in, cash-out agents in Nigeria highlights that women’s ability to become or remain agents is heavily shaped by their access to startup capital and ongoing float, even when they have the skills and demand exists in their communities. The MicroSave study argues for bundled solutions: appropriate credit, business support, and liquidity tools tailored to women. Similarly, work on DFS agents in Indonesia shows that lending to agents using their digital transaction history as a basis represents a large, under-tapped opportunity and suggests that structured working-capital products for agents can strengthen network performance overall. While not always designed exclusively for women, these experiences demonstrate that capital and float are design variables, not fixed barriers: when providers and lenders intentionally create agent-focused credit solutions, entry for women becomes more feasible.

Third, there is evidence that women agents change how customers use and trust digital finance.

Experimental and observational work from African markets shows that women often express higher levels of trust when interacting with female agents and may be more willing to share information or seek help in such settings. Studies on agent banking find that women appear more willing to engage with other women in transactional settings, suggesting that the availability of female agents can increase comfort and uptake among female customers. These findings are consistent with global work on women’s digital financial inclusion, which emphasises that representation at the frontline is a key factor in moving from account ownership to active, confident usage.

Taken together, these experiences do not offer a single template that Bangladesh can copy, but they do point to three robust design principles:
•    build women-agent pipelines through women’s organisations and livelihood networks;
•    treat working capital and liquidity as solvable design problems, not reasons to exclude women; and
•    recognise that women agents can materially shift trust and usage patterns, especially for women customers.

Policy roadmap: Building a gender-inclusive agent network for Bangladesh

Bangladesh can break the <3% barrier in women’s MFS agents, but only with a coordinated shift in policy, provider design, and ecosystem partnerships. Three strategic levers matter most.

1. Regulatory realignment: Introduce gender-responsive MFS agent guidelines, require sex-disaggregated agent reporting, and extend the spirit of the agent-banking mandate to digital channels. Simplify KYC and licensing for home-adjacent women-run outlets and incentivise providers through supervisory nudges tied to network diversity, safety, and service quality.

2. Provider-level design shifts: Recruit through women-focused networks i.e. MFIs, NGOs, SHGs rather than male retail channels. Deploy gender-sensitive training, safe training venues, and community-based outlet models. Introduce agent working-capital tools (micro-float credit lines, shared liquidity pools) and redesign incentives to reward trust, compliance, and customer retention.

3. Ecosystem investments: Fund district-scale demonstration pilots, blended-finance guarantees for women-agent float, along with digital- and business-literacy pathways. Partner with women-centric MFIs to identify, onboard, and mentor women agents at scale.

A gender-inclusive agent network is not a social add-on; it is core digital infrastructure for Bangladesh’s next stage of financial inclusion.

Rebuilding inclusion from the frontline

Bangladesh’s digital finance journey shows that access alone does not produce inclusion; the architecture of participation matters. Women are central to the digital economy as users and earners yet structurally absent from the frontline. Rebalancing this requires redesigning recruitment, capital support, and incentives so that women can participate not as exceptions, but as a standard part of the agent network.

This article was first published on “The business standard” platform on 18th December 2025.

The Digital Public Infrastructure Readiness Report

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This report is drafted on behalf of the Nigeria Governance Forum (NGF) to assess the readiness of 37 Nigerian states to utilize the DPI approach in public service delivery. Following this, we developed state-specific roadmaps tailored to each state’s current DPI maturity to facilitate their inclusive digital transformation. This report reflects our year-long collaboration with Nigerian states, during which we identified strengths and weaknesses across digital identity systems, interoperable payment systems, data exchange platforms, and foundational connectivity infrastructure.

Connecting innovation, institutions, and the missing middle: Insights from the 2025 Nobel for building labs and market creation

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A seismic shift emerged in how we view society and civilizational progress when Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt, and Joel Mokyr received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The trio reminded the world that innovation results from deliberate design, not luck. Their collective work explains why societies grow when they enable new ideas to replace old ones. This process, and its dependencies, lies on entrepreneurs, innovators, and on institutions that learn, compete, and collaborate. 

The Nobel Prize feels personal for those who are building innovation labs and market-creation programs. It validates the messy, iterative work to incorporate startups into bureaucracies, align funders and regulators, and turn pilots into real markets. It tells us that the job is to design systems that enable continuous innovation rather than to simply “do innovation.” From this research, we can draw three vital lessons that link with MSC’s work in the startup space under our Startup Innovation and Acceleration (SIA) team. 

Lesson 1: Innovation requires institutions that learn: Joel Mokyr’s research shows that economic progress occurs when societies build institutions that value useful knowledge and share experiments, failures, and cumulative lessons rather than hiding them.

The Bihar Krishi digital platform embodies this spirit. Developed in collaboration with the Bihar Agriculture Department in India, Bihar Krishi is among MSC’s leading innovation-lab projects. It has unified 50-plus government programs and services for more than 750,000 smallholder farmers within 18 months of launch. The platform has transformed a state department into a living digital entity that continually learns and builds institutional muscle beyond technology. The department now has its own innovation cadence, which intends to expand toward 4 million farmers through AI-driven advisory, market linkage, and financial services modules. 

Bihar Krishi offers three simple yet profound takeaways for any innovation lab. 

The lab must capture lessons as deliberately as it funds experiments; 

Every pilot should leave behind codified knowledge, whether templates, APIs, procurement notes, or data taxonomies, which reduces the cost of the next experiment; 

Innovation without institutional memory is mere performance art. 

Lesson 2: Creative destruction needs safe spaces to function: If we move to the work of Mokyr’s partners, Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, the core idea of creative destruction can sound brutal. Yet, the essence of creative destruction is renewal. New ideas must be allowed to challenge the old, or progress stalls. For governments, banks, and large agencies, this is uncomfortable territory.

Yet, when we examine initiatives, such as the FPS Sahay program in India, we see a controlled pathway for responsible innovation. FPS Sahay enables fair price shop (FPS) entrepreneurs to access invoice-backed digital working-capital loans and allows FinTechs to pilot alternative approaches within a supervised setting. The platform is the brainchild of the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and the Department of Food and Public Distribution, with technical support from MSC (MicroSave Consulting).  

The FPS Sahay program carved new credit pathways for 60 entrepreneurs in the pilot phase. Post-pilot discussions are underway to explore the potential to scale to 500,000 microenterprises and create a policy pathway for embedded finance.  

The lesson is that labs must make room for controlled disruption, which helps simplify onboarding for innovators, provides clear “go or no-go” decision gates, and includes honest sunset clauses. This structure enables pilot programs that do not work to end smoothly, and those that do work to scale quickly. Institutions need permission structures to let new programs replace old ones without fear. 

Lesson 3: Markets require active engineering: Innovation fails when the ecosystem is unprepared to absorb it. Mokyr’s “useful knowledge” meets Aghion-Howitt’s “competition” only when markets, regulation, and capital align. This is the key logic of MSC’s SIA team’s market-creation stream, which works to design accelerators, challenge funds, and centers of excellence (CoEs). Together, these mechanisms serve as vehicles to engage with innovators, absorb new business models or systems of product and service delivery, shape demand, and unlock private investment around complex public problems. 

The Financial Inclusion Lab (India), co-built with IIMA Ventures and MSC, exemplifies this approach. It brought 49 startups, mostly FinTechs, into the same room as regulators, investors, and banks, to translate sandbox pilots into investable ventures. Those startups went on to raise USD 250 million in follow-on capital and reach 45 million low-income customers.

The lab accelerates startups that engineer a market for inclusive finance, much akin to what the Nobel trio modeled theoretically. 

The design rule is clear for innovation labs elsewhere. The priority is to build the ecosystem handholding, which includes regulatory dialogue, data interoperability, and blended-finance pools, before private markets can scale solutions. These three lessons inform the efforts of the SIA practice at MSC, which works on two interconnected fronts: 

  1. Institutionalinnovation labs:We help governments, banks, and public programs create arm-length labs that change how they learn, procure, and deliver by testing solutions safely, working with startups, and building institutional capability. 
  2. Market-creation programs (accelerators, challenge funds, andCoEs):These programs shape demand for new solutions in a sector. They allow institutions to engage with innovators, absorb new business models, and direct private capital toward complex public problems. 

Institutional labs improve how a single institution learns and delivers. In contrast, market-creation programs establish the broader ecosystem conditions of demand, capital, and partnerships that individual labs cannot achieve on their own. 

When these two fronts connect, institutional labs validate what works, while market-creation programs help scale these solutions. The resulting market signals feed back into labs with new data and partners. This feedback loop, what Nobel economists call cumulative innovation, is how experimentation grows into a system. 

Why does it matter now? 

Whether we discuss climate adaptation, farm productivity, or AI for public purposes, the challenge is not a shortage of ideas but rather a shortage of systems that allow ideas to survive in contact with reality.

As the Bihar Krishi Digital Platform digitizes agri-services, FPS Sahay rewires credit for microentrepreneurs, and Financial Inclusion Lab alumni expand access to digital finance. Together, these programs offer glimpses of the decade ahead. This future shows innovation anchored in institutions, scaled through markets, and continuously improved by ecosystem feedback. This is good economics and good governance that proves how creative destruction becomes constructive inclusion. 

Today, institutions spend trillions yet innovate with decades-old capacity. In this scenario, MSC’s SIA practice has a clear mandate. Our mission is to build labs that turn experimentation into permanent capability and markets that make innovation inevitable. That is the heart of SIA’s mission and exactly what this year’s Nobel prize reminded us to keep doing. 

The Intelligent Revenue Authority Readiness Report

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This report evaluates the digital public infrastructure readiness of revenue authorities across Nigeria’s 36 states and the FCT using the Intelligent Revenue Authority (IRA) framework. It analyzes maturity across person-to-government, business-to-government, and government-to-government payment systems, highlighting significant variation in digital adoption. While some states demonstrate advanced integration, automation, and data use, many rely on manual processes and fragmented systems. The report proposes phased, state-specific roadmaps to strengthen interoperability, automation, digital governance, and human capacity, aiming to improve revenue mobilisation and service delivery.

Timely Wages, Trusted Payments: Smart Payments for Urban Livelihoods

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Urban livelihoods in India are predominantly informal, leaving workers vulnerable to insecure employment and limited social protection. This vulnerability was starkly exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of migrant and low-income urban workers faced sudden income losses. The Housing and Urban Development Department (H&UDD) of the Government of Odisha responded to this crisis by working with existing community networks to create mass employment opportunities for the urban poor, informal, and migrant laborers. While MUKTA provided a critical safety net, its effectiveness was undermined by severe delays in wage payments to beneficiaries. These challenges undermined the intended outcomes of MUKTA. They not only strained workers’ livelihoods but also resulted in weak fiscal accountability at the urban local body (ULB) and state levels.  

To address these challenges, MSC, in partnership with the state government, designed and implemented a scalable Smart Payments Solution (SPS).  The solution combined a digital program management platform, MUKTASoft, with a just-in-time funding system. MUKTASoft digitized every stage of scheme implementation using a rule-based smart payments engine. The JIT funding mechanism ensured that funds were released directly from the state treasury to beneficiaries’ bank accounts.   

The pilot implementation of SPS delivered substantial results. Wage delays were reduced, approval times fell sharply, utilization certificate pendency dropped to zero, and overall fund management efficiency improved. Women SHG members also reported faster receipt of payments, reduced administrative burden, and greater financial independence. The success of the pilot led to the statewide rollout of SPS across all ULBs in Odisha. This case study demonstrates how smart payments, grounded in sound public financial management principles, can improve welfare delivery systems, and strengthen livelihood outcomes for urban informal workers at scale.