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Women of the World Endowment / Tesser — Caring for Tomorrow (2024)

Eppanapally P, Ngunga S, Bussman-Wise J. "Caring for Tomorrow: A Guide to Investing in the Care Economy." Women of the World Endowment and Tesser Capital Management, November 2024.

Key findings used in wiki

Scale of the U.S. care economy

  • Americans spend $648 billion annually on care, making the care economy a substantial, investable market that spans childcare, eldercare, disability care, and in-home support.
  • The market is underfunded and overlooked by investors and policymakers relative to its size and urgency.
  • Demand is driven by demographic shifts — aging, fertility decline, women's labor-force participation, and the migration of care from institutions to home.

Market, policy, and investment barriers

The authors frame the investment gap across three kinds of barriers:

  1. Social challenges — care work is undervalued, caregiver burden is normalized, and the sector suffers from fragmented delivery and opaque quality signals.
  2. Market and investment barriers — long sales cycles, small individual check sizes, limited exit comparables, and low investor familiarity with care business models.
  3. Policy barriers — patchwork federal and state policies, no single reimbursement spine for family-caregiver support, and limited policy incentives for long-term capital.

Investment thesis: why blended capital matters

  • The Care Economy is a rapidly growing sector with potential for high financial returns, but the risk profile and business-model maturity vary widely.
  • Blended capital models — philanthropic capital (e.g., program-related investments), catalytic capital, and community development finance — can de-risk early-stage Care Economy investments and catalyze market-rate capital.
  • Investment opportunities span the full capital continuum: philanthropy and blended capital, public fixed income, CDFIs, private credit, public equities, real assets, private equity, and venture capital.

What the authors call for

  • Governments, investors, businesses, and individuals should invest in building a stronger, more equitable care infrastructure.
  • Impact measurement should capture both financial and social returns rather than treating them as competing axes.
  • "Moonshot ideas" point at structural gaps — caregiver identification, reimbursement pathways, interoperable care data, and dignified care-worker economics.

Why it matters for the wiki

  • Provides a citable, investor-facing statement of the scale of the U.S. care economy ($648B annually) that anchors the market-gap argument on evidence/market-gap.md.
  • Supports the positioning claim that caregiver-facing infrastructure is structurally underfunded relative to its scale — which is the market gap GiveCare operates in.
  • Frames blended capital as the appropriate funding profile for early-stage caregiver products, which matters for how GiveCare thinks about philanthropic, payer, and venture capital simultaneously rather than in sequence.