Research forges solidarity in recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work
Everyday, women and girls perform the essential tasks within their families that keep households running, which can include caring for children and the sick, cooking, cleaning, working for income and managing finances. Woven into the fabric of these daily practices are the cultural norms, support systems and government policies that assume that women and girls are better suited to unpaid care work than men and boys. Barely perceptible, these influences sustain very unequal workload patterns that are hard to change.
Unpaid care work is essential for human wellbeing but largely unrecognized. The disproportionate share of this work borne by women and girls limits their opportunities in work and education and their time for leisure and rest. It can also have a negative impact on their health.
Activists, advocates, community leaders and government representatives who work for equality and bring attention to this issue necessarily encounter tensions. They need proven solutions on how to build solidarity and mitigate the risk of pushback from families, communities and decision-makers.
Supported by Scaling Care Innovations in Africa, a partnership between IDRC and Global Affairs Canada, four research teams working in Benin, Togo, South Africa, Rwanda and Tanzania are testing care solutions that are context-appropriate, scalable and rooted in collaboration.
Research highlights
Care solutions that build solidarity
- A program supporting new and expectant fathers in Rwanda has led to more sharing of care work and decision-making in the home.
- Stories about the human cost of being a caregiver with insufficient support, in the Western Cape, South Africa, have led to more social programs with care needs in mind.
- Knowledge of the hidden economic cost of unpaid work in West Africa is helping design national development policies that explicitly address the issue of care.
- A new module on care in a training program for women farmers and community male champions is enhancing agricultural livelihoods and gender equality in Tanzania.
Engaging fathers as allies in Rwanda
In Rwanda, research on the Bandebereho (role model) program is generating evidence to assess its impact and potential for expansion. The program supports new and expectant fathers to take an active role in caregiving and household responsibilities by creating a safe space for men to role-play care tasks, reflect on their lives and discuss community norms and expectations. Using a randomized control trial, the Rwanda Men’s Resource Centre in partnership with the organization Equimundo, demonstrated that fathers participating in Bandebereho were more likely to share care and decision-making at home and less likely to use violence against their partners than fathers outside the program.
This strong evidence of success has built buy-in for scaling up the program nationally, and it has offered a culturally grounded way to frame gender equality as a benefit to families and communities. Bandebereho pre-empts discussions about the gendered division of labour and brings people onboard in support of women’s empowerment.
Caregivers telling their stories in South Africa
Led by the University of Cape Town in South Africa, in partnership with the Western Cape Government and two organizations, Flourish and the School of Hard Knocks, the Sharing the Motherload project is amplifying the voices of women caregivers through participatory action research and storytelling. Low-income caregivers are engaged as research partners who are co-creating definitions and narratives of the impact of unpaid care work in their communities by documenting their daily realities and the human cost of being a caregiver with insufficient support. This co-owned research evidence becomes a tool for advocacy and building solidarity, as community members and policymakers can see the immense costs that women bear due to the disproportionate share of care responsibilities that falls on them.
Used in dialogues with policymakers, the voices of women caregivers have sparked new conversations about how to design social programs and infrastructure with care needs in mind. The exchanges have led to new targeted programs, such as food vouchers and care support for underweight pregnant mothers and mothers of underweight newborns and government plans to reduce the number of departments mothers need to go to for services in the Western Cape.
Localizing policy in West Africa
In Benin and Togo, a team of researchers and advocates led by the Consortium régional pour la recherche en économie générationnelle is fostering national dialogues on care using evidence. In partnership with two women’s rights organizations — the Association d’aide au développement des femmes du Bénin and Association Coeur Solidaire — the team is quantifying the intergenerational impacts of unpaid care in economic terms and linking them to development priorities. Revealing the hidden economic costs of the time women and girls spend on unpaid care work over their lifetimes helps decision-makers understand the need for policies that can lead to better economic, health and educational outcomes at the population level.
This project has created a space for civil society and decision-makers to define national priorities that consider these hidden costs and design national development policies that explicitly address the issue of care.
Lightening the care load in agricultural communities in Tanzania
In Tanzania’s Iringa District, CARE Tanzania in partnership with Laterite, a data and analytics firm, are testing how a module on unpaid care can improve CARE’s Farmer Field and Business School, a participatory and women-focused agricultural extension program. The project also involves male community leaders as champions to raise awareness of unpaid care work, empowering these champions to share their knowledge with other community members, particularly men in their villages.
Ongoing dialogue fosters a sense of shared purpose to reduce and redistribute unpaid care work. Tools like scorecards, where community members rate services, build trust between the community and government.
Lessons on changing norms
The results from these projects point to three lessons on how research can support shared understanding and bridge differences in opinion to create sustained change:
- Evidence can play an important role in the long run
Advocacy is more effective when you have evidence — economic analysis, data obtained through trials or knowledge through storytelling — that highlights the needs of caregivers and responds directly to the needs of potential allies. - Engaging men and communities is essential
To be effective, care solutions must include men, not only as subjects of change, but as allies who are invested in the outcome. Research can help identify critical moments in men’s lives to shift key social norms, while engaging with communities can help cement these shifts. - Participatory research methods are powerful tools for solidarity
Research methods that prioritize co-creation, inclusion and community accountability and policy engagement are not just ethical — they are effective and reduce the potential for pushback.
Awareness of inequality in care work is growing as evidenced by the UN General Assembly’s decision in 2023 to proclaim an International Day of Care and Support, to be commemorated annually on October 29. Locally led action-research that responds to the questions and concerns of community and government decision-makers has shown that it is possible to foster trust, forge unconventional alliances and support sustainable change.
Contributors: Evelyn Baraké, program officer, IDRC; Deepta Chopra, professorial research fellow, Institute of Development Studies; Ameeta Jaga, professor, University of Cape Town; Kate Doyle, senior fellow, Equimundo; Miriam Selva, technical advisor for strategic partnerships and research, CARE; and Latif Dramani, professor, Université de Thiès, Senegal.
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