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Initiative to address women’s care load in Africa expands with two new projects

 
Two new research projects are joining the IDRC-supported Scaling Care Innovations in Africa initiative to redress gender inequalities in unpaid care.
An 11-year-old girl, Emily Witbooi, is seen cooking while carrying her baby sister on her back.
James Oatway/Panos Pictures
Eleven-year-old Emily Witbooi, in South Africa, cares for her sisters as their mother battles AIDS, highlighting the burden of caregiving on young girls.

Evidence and policy dialogues on elder care in Botswana, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa will support policy action on the provision of services for elders and their caregivers. In Benin and Togo, research to quantify the value of care work and its impact along gender, age and income lines will support policymaking. 

These innovative projects will drive research and action to reshape how unpaid care work is valued, shared and supported at the policy level, advancing gender equality and social welfare across sub-Saharan Africa. 

Launched in July 2023, Scaling Care Innovations in Africa is a five-year, CAD25-million partnership between Global Affairs Canada and IDRC. With the addition of these two projects, the initiative now supports 19 research teams: nine focused on policy-oriented solutions and 10 on program-based solutions across 15 countries. 

The initiative supports both policy and program focused projects to address unpaid care work through the triple "R" framework — recognize, reduce and redistribute. Policy projects seek to drive structural changes by embedding the recognition of care work within national frameworks, budgets and laws. Program projects implement hands-on solutions to reduce and redistribute the care burden at the community level, using time-saving technologies, improved services and shifts in social norms.

Read about the nine policy innovations

In a country with over 50 market centres and where 80% of women make up the informal vendors, the need to provide services to meet the child-care needs of informal women workers is an ever-pressing challenge. Wow Mom, a female-owned and led Kenyan-based social enterprise, aims to encourage the development of child-care and lactation facilities in market centres across the country — starting with scaling the initiative in Gikomba, Nairobi, the largest open-air market in East Africa. By generating evidence and capturing the needs of users, this project aims to amplify demand for policymakers to take action.

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People caring for persons living with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) — like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases — face many challenges, particularly during health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by the University of Nairobi, this project aims to create a national policy targeting these unpaid care workers in Kenya, through evidence generated by the community-based Light-A-Candle program. Launched in 2021, this program has created virtual communities for NCD caregivers to share experiences, offer counselling services and address challenges like caregiver burn-out and grief.

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The Government of Ethiopia has committed to integrating gender equality into all its policies and programs. Led by the Network of Ethiopian Women’s Associations, this project aims to pinpoint gaps in existing policies and structures to support this gender mainstreaming and budgeting for unpaid care domestic work. With an emphasis on partnering with local women’s rights organizations, the network is collaborating with local beneficiaries, civil society organizations, the Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, and government ministries and agencies related to labour, skills development, agriculture, health, education, private-sector investment and statistical services.

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Despite one fourth of Ghanaian children experiencing developmental delays, those who care for them are typically left to do it alone, often facing social exclusion because of negative associations with disabilities. The Africa Center for Democracy and Socio-economic Development aims to advocate on behalf of these unpaid caregivers. By engaging with nearly 700 caregivers in the Greater Accra and Northern regions, the centre’s research will identify existing and promising new strategies to reduce their unpaid work through the nation’s inclusive education policy.

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Working with Benin’s Ministry of Social Affairs and other key stakeholders, the African Centre for Equitable Development is generating important evidence in support of an inclusive child-care policy for the informal sector. The project includes setting up five mobile daycare units and five shared-responsibility centres, for example, to inform updates to current child-care policies. The research team also intends to increase public awareness and broader recognition of the importance of care services by creating educational resources and engaging with community leaders. 

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The University of Cape Town in South Africa is building on a pilot that documented the straining experiences of low-income mothers’ unpaid care work. The term ‘motherload’ refers to the invisible, increasing and mentally draining unpaid care work that is exacerbated by challenging living conditions and the lack of male partners' involvement in child-care and household responsibilities. At the request of the women participating in the pilot, the project is expanding to include low-income fathers and informing care-policy dialogues by sharing evidence and data through the engagement of key stakeholders, policymakers and funders. 

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Gender norms in many African countries assign women the primary responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. Despite the essential nature of this work, policies often undervalue it and perpetuate economic inequality and gender stereotypes. Led by the Consortium régional pour la recherche en économie générationelle, this project will quantify the value of the care economy and analyze the impact of care responsibilities under current and proposed policies according to gender, age and income groups in Benin and Togo. By engaging key decision-makers and gender-equality advocates in  policy dialogues, it will foster a coherent understanding and recognition of unpaid care work to be reflected in policies and legislative reforms. 

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Southern Africa has one of the largest and fastest-growing elderly populations in Africa. Care for these older adults is primarily managed by families, particularly women and girls. It is unpaid and largely unrecognized. This research project builds on a pilot that started in South Africa and expands to include Botswana, Malawi and Namibia. Led by the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the research team will generate evidence on how elder care is managed. These findings, combined with national multi-stakeholder dialogues, will identify policy options and help design national strategies for elder care.

As Zimbabwe devolves decision-making power from central to local authorities, there is an opportunity to update legislation to address the unequal share of unpaid care and domestic work undertaken by women. Building on previous success in three districts, a coalition led by women’s rights organizations and the Women’s Academy for Leadership and Political Excellence is carrying out research, engaging citizens in law-making and informing policymakers to support change that recognizes and reduces unpaid care work in the districts of Mutare, Masvingo and Harare and at the national level. Potential areas for improvement include water infrastructure, public transportation and solar energy to address power outages.

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Read about the 10 program innovations being supported

CARE Tanzania leads this project to adapt and scale up gender-transformative Farmer Field and Business Schools, developed by CARE and operating in 18 countries. The research team is adding new care-focused modules to the curriculum and testing them in Mufindi district, Tanzania, against the schools’ standard curriculum of hands-on learning for farmers about new agricultural techniques and technologies. The schools already integrate climate-resilient agricultural practices, business and entrepreneurship skills, gender equality and women’s empowerment. Evidence from the research can improve how agricultural policies and programs contribute to gender equality.

No two communities are alike and each has its own unique set of needs when looking for support for early-childhood development. Led by the Aga Khan University-Kenya, this project addresses the context-specific, care-related needs of the nomadic and pastoral communities of Lamu and Isiolo counties, in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya. The research team is co-designing and implementing with community members approximately 100 early-childhood development centres across the two counties to alleviate the unpaid care responsibilities of approximately 2,700 women and girls, based on an already successful program in four other Kenyan counties. 

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A couples intervention program called Bandebereho (meaning role model in Kinyarwanda) engages men by challenging harmful gender norms, fostering more equitable relationships and promoting men’s caregiving in Rwanda. The gender-transformative program, implemented by the Rwanda Men’s Resource Centre, has reached over 12,000 couples since its inception and proven to increase men’s involvement in caregiving. In collaboration with other organizations, this centre is now expanding the model’s reach through the country’s health system to promote the inclusion of women with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities, and to better integrate the role of community health workers as key allies in scaling efforts.

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First introduced in 2014, Tiny Totos is a promising market-based and user-centred daycare-franchise model that addresses the need for high-quality, yet affordable child care of 8,000 caregivers in Nairobi’s informal settlements. Led by the Population Council, the project seeks to enhance the Tiny Totos model, with the aim of cost-effectively and efficiently deepening the impacts that the model generates among the women and families using the Tiny Totos-affiliated daycares. The project’s evidence will also inform care-policy processes in Kenya on the role of social-franchising models in addressing the unmet needs of low-income women in informal settlements.

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Time poverty is among the largest impediments to achieving gender equality in Freetown, Sierra Leone — where women (particularly those experiencing poverty) are likely to work 1.6 hours for every hour a man works on paid and unpaid care. The Freetown City Council leads this project to address the underutilization of municipal resources and services that could support care responsibilities by reforming local provisioning using a care-block model, which creates one-stop shops for child care, eldercare and critical services that reduce and support the unpaid care responsibilities of poorer women in the city. The care-blocks model was successfully piloted in the city of Bogota, Colombia, and is being scaled in various parts of the world to create more “caring cities.”

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The lack of affordable and quality child-care services is one of the key barriers hindering low-income women and girls in Ethiopia from advancing economically. As the city of Addis Ababa plans to establish 1,000 child-care centres over the next three years, the Policy Studies Institute is supporting the rollout by ensuring the development of accessible and quality services that respond to the needs of low-income mothers and by ensuring their representation in policy dialogues.

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Led by Ripple Effect Kenya, this project aims to reduce the time women spend on unpaid care activities, including those tied to small-scale livestock rearing, through a blend of new labour-saving innovations and community engagement aimed at shifting gender norms. Labour-saving technologies include improved forage species and tools to harvest and process the forage, while time-saving innovations include village child-care services and a donkey transportation service. The model bundles the development of these commercial activities with dialogues at household and community levels to foster reflection on gender norms that drive inequalities in decision-making, workload and control over resources.

In the rural district of Kishapu, Tanzania, the Economic and Social Research Foundation will scale up proven innovations, including installing water-harvesting systems, training women and girls in entrepreneurship and job skills, and engaging couples in discussing gender norms by adapting the Rwandan Bandebereho (role model) program. The goal: to sustainably reduce and redistribute the time women and girls spend on unpaid care and domestic work, while providing new opportunities for their economic empowerment.

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Recognizing the overlap between gender-equality and climate-action goals, this project aims to address women’s disproportionate responsibility for care work, through energy-efficient TIKA cookstoves. These stoves have already demonstrated significant benefits: they require approximately 60% less firewood and 40% less coal and save approximately two hours daily in time spent on wood gathering and cooking. The research, led by the Centre ivoirien de recherches économiques et sociales, documents the stoves’ impacts on women’s income-generating and wellbeing to inform efforts to scale their use.

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The WE-CARE project aims to scale the Belle Colline model developed by CARE International to reduce unpaid care work, empower women and girls, eliminate gender-based violence and create economic opportunities in rural communities in the Bubanza and Gitega provinces of Burundi. The model tackles unpaid care challenges through a blend of activities aimed at shifting norms, engaging communities and building a network of organizations to advocate for gender equality and a reduction of unpaid care work in Burundi.

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