Women's economic empowerment – where is unpaid care work?

Three ways market systems approaches should consider women's unpaid care work.

Unpaid care work lies at the root of our societies. It includes direct care of people, such as childcare or care of dependent adults, and the domestic work that facilitates caring for people, such as cooking, cleaning or collecting water or firewood. Across all societies, these responsibilities often lie solely on women and girls – accounting for 1/2 to 2/3 of women's total work hours; plus this time and work is usually not recognised or valued, so care work becomes 'invisible' as well. The implications of the unequal distribution of unpaid care work for women, sometimes including excessive tasks and invisible work, include time poverty, poor health and well‐being, limited mobility, and the perpetuation of women's unequal status in society.

Why should market systems care about care?

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Sepúlveda Carmona:

'Unpaid care work is a major reason why women do not enjoy equal rights at work, including fair and equal wages and safe and healthy working conditions […] As a result, for many women living in poverty with unpaid care responsibilities, work is not empowering but rather a survival necessity.'

Market systems approaches often fail to recognise unpaid care work because it is either outside of the paid economy or because the programme fails to disaggregate roles and responsibilities by sex at the household level, leading to, for example, negative unintended consequences or ineffective interventions – that only reach men.

Often, market systems programmes are based on assumptions around the elasticity of women's time, among others. While additional work can represent a burden and not a benefit for women or heavy or unequally distributed unpaid care work can be a barrier for women to engage in paid economic activities. For example, if a programme does not address the long hours a woman spends collecting fuel or women's negotiating power in the household, women may face a double burden: working outside their household and inside it; their care responsibilities might be transferred to their daughter or elders; they may have to pay someone; or some care work might be left undone.

Furthermore, when programmes identify excessive and unequal care responsibilities, they often face challenges addressing these using a facilitation approach that enables sustainability beyond the initial intervention period.

How can programmes consider unpaid care work?

The first step is to recognise care. Programmes should undertake a gendered market analysis, with sex disaggregated data, which considers unpaid care activities (not only productive ones) completed by women and men, and how these interact with the selected market system and subsystems.

IDS, together with Oxfam, are researching how market systems approaches can enable women’s economic empowerment through addressing unpaid care work. We have, together with the Unpaid Care and Market Systems Working Group[1], built a conceptualisation to integrate the provision of care within the framework of market systems. In this document we set out three ways (not mutually exclusive) market systems programmes can consider unpaid care. These are:

• Adapt programme delivery to take account of unpaid care work (mainstreaming)
• Design interventions to address specific constraints related to care work
• Focus on unpaid care as a strategic market sector.

We recently completed fieldwork in Ethiopia, in collaboration with Oxfam’s Gendered Enterprise Development for Horticulture Producers programme to pilot this conceptual framework. We have pilot tested the approach to use participatory, market systems processes to design interventions to address specific constraints, that employ 'systems thinking' and techniques of facilitation to deliver sustainable, scalable, system‐wide solutions.

Looking forward

The findings and further guidance on how to diagnose, analyse and address the provision of care in market systems will be published soon. This will also look at how to implement market systems responses to care. The report will also include exciting, positive examples we have identified of market system programmes and others already providing solutions to this. We look forward engaging with you further, once we present our final report.