The Motherload: Shouldering the burden of unpaid care work

Nomboniso Bunu sighed as she kneaded dough into a ball and dropped it into a pan of boiling water. It was 8 o’clock in the morning in an informal settlement on the southern edge of Cape Town, South Africa. Already, she had been working non-stop for the past two and a quarter hours. She made various types of breakfasts for her three sons, prepared school bags and lunchboxes, fetched and boiled water for bathing, dressed her kids, played games with her youngest, did the washing up, changed the bedding and hung out the laundry. And her day was only just getting started.

At 8:30 a.m., she walked her three-year-old son along unpaved alleyways to the local creche, before returning to prepare meals for her brother and in-laws. At around 9 a.m., she could finally make her own breakfast. She then sat on a low plastic stool to eat, briefly savouring the peace and quiet of an empty house. Yet no sooner had she eaten the last of her porridge than the work of cleaning up began. Everything from the cutlery to the floors must be spotless. As the mother of the house, this is what society expects of her. 

By the time she eventually got dressed for her work at a local non-profit organization, around midday, she was already exhausted. When work is quiet, she noted, the first thing she does is to pass out on her desk for a nap.

“That’s my time to relax,” said Nomboniso.

All of this is just a small part of what a team of researchers in a project led by the University of Cape Town have termed “The Motherload,” the highly gendered, often invisible, under-valued work that individuals performing mothering undertake and which hinders their economic security, safety and wellbeing. The research project, jointly funded by IDRC and Global Affairs Canada under the Scaling Care Innovations in Africa program, seeks to better understand the complexities of unpaid care work, while at the same time hoping to combat gender norms around care work and influence policymaking. 

“The shifting of gender norms is a global struggle,” said Professor Ameeta Jaga, the project’s principal investigator. “Certain care work burdens cut across class and race, but it's exacerbated for low-income populations by a context in which poverty, insecurity, infrastructural deficiencies and structural inequality are all pervasive.”

“We were interested in seeing how these vulnerabilities intersect.”

Existing research, explained Jaga, has often focused on the individual situations of mothers, and often from a middle-class, developed region viewpoint. The Motherload project, by contrast, set out to centre the voices of low-income mothers to rethink integrated responses relevant to their local context, to address their needs.

For Nomboniso, the challenges of the local context add significantly to her experience of The Motherload. Her home is a small two-room building of timber and sheet-metal set on the side of a hill in a thicket of pine trees. The family uses one room for sleeping.  The other functions as a living space and a kitchen. There is no bathroom and no running water. Electricity comes through a tangle of cables, when thieves haven’t looted the power lines to sell the scrap metal. When the tap near her home stops working, as it did earlier this year, she must fetch water from a distant borehole, a roundtrip of about an hour. 

Sometimes, Nomboniso nears the breaking point. One Sunday in May this year, while making breakfast, something snapped.

“I felt like I was dizzy. I couldn’t even stand,” she recalled. “Tears just fell down my face.”

She returned to bed and didn’t wake up until midday. By the time she emerged, she was pretty sure she understood the root of the problem. She was simply exhausted, utterly worn down by the physical, mental, financial and emotional strains of The Motherload. When she tried to explain this to her husband, he struggled to comprehend.

“You’re just tired?” he asked her, surprised. “That’s why you were like that?”

He insisted on going out to buy medicine, even though she told him she wasn’t sick. Nomboniso said that whenever she goes quiet or seems a little out of sorts, her family assumes she must be sick. The notion that the heavy load of care work could be exhausting rarely seems to register.

Nomboniso’s husband, she said, is more supportive than most. Sometimes, when she’s not around, he carries out her normal morning tasks in the run-up to school drop-off. Yet he calls her to check if he’s getting it right, she remarked, even if she’s prepared all the food and clothes beforehand to make things easier for him. And when she gets home, she feels an unspoken need to congratulate him.   

She’s aware that it isn’t always easy for him either. When he goes out to collect water for her or to hang up the washing, neighbours will laugh at him, she stated. They say he’s spoiling his wife. 

“You doing the washing for your wife!?” they exclaim. “You’re a man! It’s not normal!”

South African society, says Jaga, remains deeply patriarchal and care work is still widely thought of as the responsibility of the mother. The Motherload project started out focusing only on mothers, but it soon became apparent that to understand the barriers to increasing men’s involvement, they would need to hear from fathers, too. The mothers themselves requested it. 

“They said, ‘We want the problem in the room,’ referring to men as the problem,” says Jaga.

After working with around ten mothers and ten fathers separately for a year and a half, the two groups came together on a chilly winter morning for a joint workshop in a community hall in the Plumstead neighbourhood of the city. Among them was Nomboniso. The group conducted a “gender fishbowl exercise” in which the mothers sat in a close circle for discussion, while the fathers observed and listened. Then the roles were reversed.   

The mothers went first, expressing what The Motherload means to them. They started with concerns over security and the strain of being held responsible for their children’s safety, even when the father is around.

“Questions would be directed at me,” said Nomboniso. “People would ask, ‘When was the last time you saw the child, and where did they say they were going?’ So, I’d be curious and question why, as the mother, I am the one being questioned when there are two people in the household who should be caregivers for the children and ensure their safety.” 

The conversation ranges widely while the fathers listen. “Maybe…it’s the way [men] grew up that makes them think care work is a woman’s responsibility, that working or paid work is a man’s responsibility,” mused Nomboniso. “But things have changed over time; everyone must adapt to the evolving world.”

When the men’s turn came, they were asked what they’ve come to learn about care work through their involvement in the project and after listening to the mothers. 

“When I joined The Motherload project, I already knew I should help — wash the dishes, cook, do care work. I knew I wouldn’t die from it,” noted one father. “But societal norms make it almost impossible. There’s so much ego and pride…When I joined this project, these conversations freed me. Talking about it gave me courage to act in my own household.” 

Another father joined the conversation: “I think one part of ending the severe motherload in households,” he said, “is for fathers like us to step up and speak to fathers who haven’t been exposed to these conversations.” Others nod in agreement. One says that mothers should be paid like football stars for their work.

The project is also working with policymakers to bring about changes that might make government interventions more accessible and tailored to the needs of low-income mothers. 

“There are well intended policies, but these often lack an understanding of the complexities of low-income mothers’ lives,” says Jaga. “So, the idea was to have lived reality evidence from the project, inform improved policy making.”

As examples of well-intentioned interventions that fail to hit the mark, Jaga draws on mother’s stories about a mobile clinic designed to support low-income mothers, but which could only be reached by walking through an unsafe area, requiring the women to pay someone from the community to accompany them. The effects of apartheid spatial planning mean that low-income communities are typically situated far from most workplaces and mothers commute long distances and for many hours, and many creches only open after they have had to leave. Furthermore, government employment initiatives don’t pay enough to cover the costs of transport and childcare.

“We're really trying to shift how policy is currently being developed,” said Jaga. “To say that if you are developing policy, you must engage with those who are meant to benefit from it the most.” 

To help policymakers make their interventions more responsive to the needs of low-income women, the project has partnered with the Western Cape Provincial Government.

“We’re engaged in the conversations around the ‘so what’ question,” said Tristan Görgens, director of strategy and policy in the Western Cape Government. “What are the implications for the wider policy agenda? And how do we make sure that the voices of the mothers, and the issues they want to advocate for, become visible in the right spaces?”

Görgens says that the collaboration is already having a tangible impact. In August, the government launched a pilot initiative known as Khulisa Care, which targets underweight pregnant mothers and mothers of underweight newborns with food vouchers and care support in an attempt to combat stunting and malnutrition.

“All of this is directly inspired by the kinds of messages we were hearing from the mothers through The Motherload project,” said Görgens, adding that mothers were consistently speaking of both the financial and emotional strains of the early months after childbirth. “I think what The Motherload has really drawn attention to is the complexity of care… in the way in which it constrains a whole range of other choices in their lives.” 

This year, for the first time ever, the provincial government’s five-year strategic plan will identify what it calls “integrated impact areas,” that is, areas in which government departments can work together to make things easier for the users of their services. This was partly a result, he shared, of hearing from the mothers in the project about the financially and emotionally draining process of having to deal with multiple government departments. 

The project is also targeting the wider population through social media, as well as through a “photo voice” exhibition of images taken by the mothers and fathers, each of which speaks to their experience of the project and calls to action. 

In the meantime, Nomboniso remarked that her participation in the project has, in itself, had a significant impact on her life. Before becoming involved, Nomboniso had never questioned the extraordinary challenges of care that she faced. It was just what mothers did. And if she ever struggled, then she must be the problem, she thought. She never felt able to ask for help without shame.

“It’s opened my mind a lot. I assumed it was my job to handle the household and childcare, and [my husband] assumed the same,” she said. “But through these Motherload workshops, I learned that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Learn more about the Scaling Care Innovations in Africa program