CARE ECONOMY AFRICA: TOWARD TRANSFORMATIVE CARE SYSTEMS AND ECONOMIES TO HARNESS AFRICA’S DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

Project Period

January 2021 - December 2023

The care economy project is geared towards an Africa-centric agenda to spearhead research and policy engagement to advance and inform policy action focusing on early child care (ECC) and long-term care (LTC) systems and economies.

This initiative acknowledges indigenous knowledge and is geared towards building on existing values and strengths, enhancing care quality, reducing, rewarding, and redistributing women’s extensive unpaid care work within households, families, and communities.

Together with the Universities of Bristol and Toronto, the Regional Consortium for Research on the Generational Economy (CREG), the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) and the Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective (NAWI), and in partnership with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the UNFPA Kenya and Senegal offices, APHRC is working to advance care work research and policy engagement in Kenya and Senegal.

The project’s overall goals are to:

  • Generate incisive, Africa-centred knowledge that clarifies the case and directions for policy and investments to expand ECC and LTC provisioning and infrastructures;
  •  Foster the consideration, understanding, embrace and use of the generated knowledge by key regional and national policy and decision-makers and other political actors;
  •  Advance Africa-centred knowledge production on care and a flourishing African scientific endeavor on care that could sustain policy change in the longer term while advancing global debates in the field.

Key project objectives are:  

  • Generating a coherent body of robust, Africa-centred, empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on present contexts, arrangements, experiences and the gendered economic, well-being and distributional impacts of ECC and LTC provision and receipt;
  • Developing macroeconomic tools to estimate the size and contribution to national income of the unpaid and paid care economies, and the anticipated effects of policies to expand care provisioning and infrastructures;
  •  Bringing  together relevant coalitions of advocacy actors to shape, and foster the use of evidence and arguments by key political actors and constituencies in developing regional and national policy agendas;
  •  Connecting African scholars and experts, and foster joint analyses and learning, with care-focused investigations in other regions as part of a global ‘care economies in context’ initiative.

PROJECT PERIOD: 

  • Start date: January 2021
  • End date: December 2023

PROJECT FUNDER:

  • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

PROJECT TEAM: 

  • Gloria Lang’at  (Team leader) 
  • Patricia Kitsao-Wekulo 
  • Margaret Nampijja 
  • Linda Oloo 
  • Ruth Muendo
  • Dieneba Aidara 
  • El Hadj Malick Sylla 
  • Khalifa Seydi Ababcar Sy Loum
  • Florence Sipalla 
  • Charity Waweru-Mwangi 

Research partners: