Crisis in Child Care

About 90 percent of child care centres serving the low income communities are on the verge of closing due to the new minimum wage ruling. This is likely to force registered child care centres to go underground, making it hard for authorities to assess the quality and safety of care unregistered centres provide. Furthermore, without a network of quality, affordable and accessible childcare to support families so that more women can join the workforce, it will be hard to achieve our goal of increasing female labour participation rate to 55 percent. Datin PH Wong and Puan Zubaidah Husin from the Association of Registered Child Care Providers explain the predicament facing child care providers.