Daniela Oliveira pays tribute to the caring work of her own mother, “the minister for home affairs”, and sets out three ways to shift how the public and governments recognise and value the labour of care.
Image from Oxfam’s website: Valuing Women’s Work (artwork by Rosie Stevens)
In the Indian/Goan community in Kenya where I grew up, a lot of women around me were stay-at-home mothers and homemakers. My own mother left her paid job to look after us and my elderly grandmother, waking up early, making breakfast, looking after my gran, cooking, cleaning, and on the go all day. She made light of all this labour as just being “at home” but my feminist dad dubbed her the “Minister of Home Affairs” and that name for her stuck.
At the time, I did not understand what kind of work my mother did: there was no name for it, apart from “housewife”. Only later did I understand that all her work was part of the care economy, the type of care work – unpaid in the home, or with low pay in informal settings – that is less valued than most paid employment. Yet it is this care work – which disproportionately falls on women and girls, particularly those in poverty and marginalised communities – that enables all other work to take place. It makes life possible.
Care work is real work, so why is it not recognised as such? In this blog, I look at three broad areas for action that can help societies and economies recognise and value care as real work.
1. Shifting Mindsets
At the heart of recognising care work as real work is shifting mindsets. We need to tell better stories about care and informal work, highlighting its contribution to economic growth and wellbeing. Shifting mindsets also means challenging gender norms. In some societies, care work is not perceived as being a man’s role, or is seen as “unmanly”, In some cases, men can be seen as lacking the ability to perform care or household tasks as effectively as women. Meanwhile, women who neglect domestic duties face criticism or, in some cases, physical violence. Yet there is strong evidence that men and boys who undertake care work contribute to happier relationships and homes.
Change is happening, even if small and sporadic. The younger generation in particular seem to have more positive views around gender equality and sharing care work in the home. Interventions can change things too. Interesting evidence from Northern Uganda, for example, suggests men undertake more unpaid care work if provided with tools or labour- and time-saving equipment such as grinding mills, or bicycles to fetch water etc. (See more on this research and analysis here.) Of course this still leaves women doing the more tedious work without any of these tools or equipment.
Building movements bringing together allies such as policy makers, civil society, media and traditional leaders can help co-create and share strong and accessible new narratives that will engage wider audiences to affect change in mindsets and policies.
Making care work visible by counting it in economic metrics is also vital: most care work is invisible, often not even quantified or included in GDP. That needs to change, as the Beyond GDP movement has said.
2. Financial support for carers
Living in Kenya, my own mother was never compensated for caring for my grandmother, and there was no practical or social support system that she could access that even recognised the work that she did. It was only after moving to the UK that she was able to access the Carers Allowance benefit. Even though she is grateful for this, if she was a single parent or carer, this would not be enough to meet the costs of living.
Even getting access to small amounts of support is hard. Getting Carers Allowance in the UK is a bureaucratic process and comes with prerequisites: it can only be accessed by people undertaking care responsibilities for more than 35 hours a week and not earning more than a very low salary of £151 a week for paid work. Those that receive it are more likely to experience poverty and also face challenges from a lack of financial and practical support in their work caring for disabled people or people suffering from long-term illnesses.
That leaves a vicious cycle of poverty and exclusion for carers in the UK, especially given the rising cost of living and lack of support to remain in paid work alongside caring responsibilities. The government needs to urgently provide both better financial and practical support for carers and parents on social security.
Elsewhere, countries are pushing more for recognising and financially supporting care work. In Kenya, for instance, there has been a move towards implementation of a new bill that legally recognises and pays community health workers, citing unpaid women midwives as a stark example of the inequities in social care (see here) as well as the introduction of a National Care Policy, but much more still needs to be done.
3. Innovative investments in care
As well as supporting individual carers, we need creative investment in public services, infrastructure and social protection to support care. Innovation in investments in care could be key to recognising care and easing the load that falls on women.
Such innovations in care are highly contextual and need to be implemented at the community level. A good example from Isiolo County in Kenya is a project called ‘Scaling Care Innovations in Africa’ partnership, co-funded by Global Affairs Canada and Canada’s IDRC. This provides community-based childcare centres that can support infant care (6-35 months) and early childhood programmes focusing on young children (36-60 months). This project is scaling up interventions that have proven to decrease unpaid care work whilst also increasing financial literacy, skill development and economic empowerment.
Such innovations also show action to support care work is right at the heart of women’s economic progress. Care work is real work and we need to value it – culturally, socially, economically and politically. In fact, if we are serious about creating an economy that works for everyone, we can’t afford not to value it.
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