New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently launched the Childcare Action Fund with an appeal to philanthropists to help raise $20 million toward providing free childcare for every New Yorker who needs it.
Critics have lambasted Mamdani’s universal childcare plan as too costly to sustain through public funding alone. Bringing philanthropy into the picture, to some, reinforced that concern.
But this isn’t a question of why a mayor is asking for philanthropic support. It’s whether we understand what it actually takes to build a childcare system in the first place. As the co-founder of the largest childcare network in East Africa, I know that philanthropy can play a catalytic role in building this much-need infrastructure; not in a way that replaces government, but in a way that helps make government investment possible.
I’ve spent the past decade working to build a childcare system from the ground up in Nairobi. And philanthropic capital is helping organize a fragmented, largely informal market. It is supporting the development of quality standards, creating the training for providers, and generating the evidence needed to inform policy. It is absorbing early risk by testing what works, what doesn’t, and understanding what it actually costs to deliver safe, quality care at scale.
Only then does the government step in -- not as a pilot funder, but as a long-term owner.
Now, if the funding Mayor Mamdani is seeking is used to temporarily subsidize childcare slots or plug short-term budget holes, then his critics will be right. It will create fragmentation, not solve it. It will relieve pressure on a broken system to deliver quick political wins without fixing the underlying conditions that made it unaffordable and inaccessible in the first place.
But there is another path: one that is less visible, less politically satisfying, and far more effective.
Philanthropy can be used to build the foundations that public systems depend on but are often too slow or too constrained to create themselves: a trained and stable workforce, clear and achievable quality standards, better data, stronger provider networks, and the physical capacity to meet demand.
These are not one-time costs. But they are front-loaded costs - investments that make it possible for government to step in and fund childcare at scale, sustainably. This is the difference between catalytic capital and substitutive capital. One builds the rails. The other keeps the train moving.
What makes this moment in New York particularly intriguing is that it challenges a common assumption: that system-building is only necessary in low-income or “informal” contexts. But childcare doesn’t fail because a country is poor. It fails because it sits at the intersection of multiple market failures, where parents can’t afford to pay the true cost, providers can’t earn a living wage, and governments have historically underinvested.
The result is the same, whether in Nairobi or New York: too few spots, too high costs, and too many families left to piece together care on their own. Seen this way, the question isn’t whether philanthropy belongs in the childcare system. It’s whether we are using it with enough discipline.
To be sure, there are real risks in inviting philanthropy into the core of a public system. Philanthropic capital can be uneven, driven by shifting priorities rather than long-term commitments. It can concentrate influence in the hands of a few, raising valid concerns about accountability and whose ideas shape public services. It can blur the lines of political and religious ideologies of family structures and views on women’s participation in the workforce. And in the absence of clear boundaries, it can quietly substitute for government responsibility rather than strengthen it.
These concerns shouldn’t be dismissed. They should be designed for.
Which is precisely why the role of philanthropy must be disciplined from the outset: time-bound, targeted toward system-building, and explicitly tied to a transition plan where government assumes ongoing ownership and financing.
We don’t question the role of catalytic capital when we build roads, energy systems, or public transit. Early investments are made to design, test, and construct so that, over time, these systems can be publicly financed, maintained, and relied upon by everyone.
Childcare should be no different.
The real measure of success will not be how much philanthropic money is raised. It will be whether, years from now, it is no longer needed. Because the goal was never to fund child care indefinitely. It was to build a system strong enough to stand on its own. And if philanthropy makes good on Mayor Mamdani's bet, every child in New York will win.
Sabrina Habib is the Co-Founder and Chief Exploration Officer of Kidogo, East Africa’s largest childcare network serving low-income families and supporting women "Mamapreneurs" to grow micro-businesses through community-based childcare centers. She is also a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership of Acumen and The OpEd Project.
