Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “unpaid care”
How should INGOs share power to work with others – and especially grassroots and community groups – to achieve a feminist economy that values all care work? Ridhi Kalaria and Silvia Galandini share insights from Oxfam’s influencing across the UK; from backing existing movements and investing in long-term change, to knowing when to step back. Illustrations by Sonaksha Iyengar.
The lack of consistent attention to gender was concerning, as was the failure to tackle the Global South debt crisis – and the blinkered expansion of private finance, despite evidence of its harms. But, says Rachel Noble, as the world turns to implementation of the Financing for Development commitments, there are valuable opportunities to seize and build on, including for the women who do most of the world’s care work.
Too many unpaid carers in the UK are struggling by on their own, unseen by policy makers. Taking inspiration from the union movement, says Hannah Webster of Care Full, it’s time to build the collective solidarity that can amplify our demands for an economy that values and supports us – and lifts carers out of poverty.
Unpaid carers like me save the NHS £119 billion a year, says Laura Barnes of the We Care Campaign – yet our rewards include burnout, poverty, never seeing friends and being pushed out of jobs. In the second blog in our series for Carers Week in the UK, she says it’s time to value what the millions of carers do: and that starts with tailored services, financial support, flexible work and access to respite.
While the needs of all unpaid carers in Scotland are often overlooked, people from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds are being especially failed. Margaret Chiwanza introduces new research that reveals how they are being pushed into poverty and struggling in silence. Addressing that, she says, demands measures co-created with communities from targeted support payments to respite breaks to health checks.
Amid a worldwide backlash against women’s rights, and after its own aid cuts that further threaten those rights, it has never been more urgent for the UK government to speak up loudly for global gender equality, says the Gender and Development Network.
Three decades after the landmark Beijing declaration to advance women’s rights, right-wing, religious, and conservative actors are reversing and obstructing hard-won progress. This International Women’s Day, our new Oxfam campaign calls on governments across the globe to reassert their commitment to gender justice, bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights, say Lata Narayanaswamy and Amina Hersi.
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.
The world needs to stop relying on a metric that ignores two thirds of the work done by women and which promotes harmful policies, says Oxfam GB CEO Halima Begum. A new collection of feminist think pieces offers a compelling and inspirational tour of the arguments and pathways for moving Beyond GDP.
Deep cuts to public spending or abandoning provision to profit-making providers will not deliver the decent services millions of women so urgently need, say Myrah Nerine and Rachel Noble.