Initiative · Latin America · 2023 — ongoing

LUCI

Latin American Urban Childcare Initiative — mapping early childhood education access

Latin American Urban Childcare Initiative — mapping access, building first-of-its-kind harmonized cross-city data on early childhood care, and supporting governments to close gaps.

Santiago · Bogotá · Santo Domingo

Making early childhood education visible across Latin American cities

LUCI — the Latin American Urban Childcare Initiative — is a multi-country research and policy project that maps and analyzes access to early childhood education across major urban areas in Latin America. The initiative builds the first harmonized database of childcare providers in the region, combining administrative records, geospatial data, AI-assisted phone agents, and field verification.

Origins: the Childcare Deserts Project

Across Latin American cities, access to formal childcare remains highly unequal. Public day-care provision has expanded, but families still face large disparities in availability, quality, and proximity of centers — especially in low-income, fast-growing urban neighborhoods. Policymakers have lacked systematic, high-resolution data to identify gaps, understand spatial mismatches between families and centers, or quantify the lived experience of childcare deserts.

To address this, the team launched the Childcare Deserts Project: an applied-research effort combining urban data science, administrative microdata, geospatial analytics, and field validation across three cities.

A scalable, city-level mapping system

The project developed an end-to-end system to crawl, verify, and geocode the entire childcare landscape of a city — including small private centers not captured in official lists. The pipeline combines:

  • Custom web-scraping and API ingestion
  • Integration with city administrative records
  • A standardized taxonomy of provider types
  • A geospatial algorithm that scores neighborhoods by supply-demand ratios and accessibility
  • A replicable workflow to refresh the maps annually and compare across cities

The result is the first harmonized cross-city map of childcare access in three Latin American capitals.

From research project to multi-country initiative

As the desert maps were shared with ministries, mayors' offices, and international organizations, demand grew for a unified platform. LUCI now operates as a multi-country research-and-policy initiative, working with governments to modernize childcare information systems, expand access, and reduce burdens on working families. The initiative builds on the original Childcare Deserts methodology while incorporating:

  • AI-assisted phone agents that verify center information at scale
  • Real-time dashboards for policymakers
  • Online search and application tools for families
  • Predictive models of unmet demand
  • Support for regulatory modernization and capacity planning

Tri-country secret-shopper study

LUCI runs a tri-country audit study using AI voice callers to measure the parent experience when seeking childcare, across Santiago, Bogotá, and Santo Domingo — capturing what families actually encounter when they try to enroll a child today.

Mission

LUCI's mission is to make childcare access transparent, measurable, and actionable. Concretely: ensure every family — regardless of neighborhood or income — can access safe, high-quality early childhood education; help governments diagnose capacity gaps, target investments, simplify enrollment, and improve transparency and equity; and strengthen democratic debate around early childhood as a public good.

Related: Copenhagen Childcare Choice ↗ Funding: Sloan Research Fellowship ↗