Coupling unpaid care domestic work with local development agenda for improved care systems in Ethiopia

 

In Ethiopia, women on average spend 13 hours a day on domestic care work. Poor and marginalized women, single-women-headed households and girls are affected more than women who are better off. The Ethiopian government has a mandate to mainstream gender across all development interventions and has taken steps to foster gender equality and recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid domestic work. However, efforts to create awareness and gender mainstreaming tend to lack an intersectional perspective.

This project will review national policies, conduct consultations and involve civil society to support the development of guidelines for integrating unpaid care considerations as part of the government's gender mainstreaming effort, including in budget allocations. It will focus on key pro-poor government sectors such as ministries of agriculture, health, investment, industry, planning and development, and labour and skills to assess and guide their gender-mainstreaming policies and practices and draw attention to the sectors deliberately or unintentionally overlooking unpaid care domestic work. It will also document and highlight the lost opportunities of not recognizing and addressing the disproportionate responsibility of unpaid care work shouldered by women and girls.

This project is supported under the Scaling Care Innovations in Africa partnership co-funded by Global Affairs Canada and IDRC. Scaling Care Innovations is a five-year initiative aimed at scaling tested and locally grounded policy and program innovations to redress gender inequalities in unpaid care work in sub-Saharan Africa.