Maestre, M., Thorpe, J., and Kidder, T. (2016). Market Systems Approaches to Enabling Women’s Economic Empowerment Through Addressing Unpaid Care Work
The paper focuses on using market system approaches to enable women’s economic empowerment through addressing unpaid care work. It uses the concept of unpaid care work within the framework of market systems, provides a case for why addressing unpaid care work is important for achieving market system outcomes and impacts, and provides learning from approaches to identify and diagnose unpaid care work and how it intersects with particular markets. The papers also look at the possibility of designing interventions for unpaid care work using participatory market systems processes. The paper argues that women make significant, unrecognised contributions to local economies and to economic development; however, they face multiple and overlapping barriers to realising their full potential in terms of access to education, information, and decision-making power. With regard to this, market systems programmes are increasingly recognising the important role that women play in market activity and including women’s economic empowerment and gender equality objectives.
The paper discusses the underlying restrictions connected to the current unpaid care arrangements that have an impact on women’s time, mobility, and agency. In order to adapt the market system so that women can benefit from economic opportunities while still performing care work, it is advised that the first step is to ask questions that help to better recognise the unpaid care provided by both men and women. Interventions may also reduce or redistribute care work or alter institutional or power relations that dictate the pattern of care responsibilities.
In order to integrate unpaid care into market system programmes, the paper offers four recommendations. The first is to recognise unpaid care work as work and production so that programmes can modify interventions in light of a better understanding of care work or include compensation for the work. The second is to reduce unpaid care work to lessen the burden of specific tasks. Interventions can help markets deliver a particular service, like healthcare, or a product, like fuel-efficient stoves, more effectively. The third is the redistribution of care work, which seeks to achieve a more equitable distribution of the total amount of unpaid care work required among households, communities, the state, and the private sector. And lastly, the representation of women in their household and community, as by doing so, some limitations on unpaid care work can be alleviated.
The paper comes to the conclusion that unpaid care has a significant impact on how well markets operate and how much poor families can profit from them. Programmes that ignore this connection could have negative effects on market activities as well as social outcomes related to care.