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ImpactMojo 101 Series · Free Forever
Care
Economy
101
Recognising, Valuing & Investing in the Work That Holds Everything Else Up — a Foundational Course for Development Practitioners in South Asia
Research-BackedSouth Asia Focus100 SlidesFree Access
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Agenda
What We Cover
01
What the Care Economy Is
Slides 3–11
02
The Invisibility of Care
Slides 12–20
03
Measuring Care: Time-Use Surveys
Slides 21–29
04
The Value of Unpaid Care
Slides 30–37
05
The Gendered Division of Care
Slides 38–46
06
Care & the Macroeconomy
Slides 47–54
07
The 5 Rs Framework
Slides 55–64
08
Care Policies
Slides 65–73
09
Paid Care Work
Slides 74–82
10
Care in South Asia
Slides 83–91
11
Practice & Policy
Slides 92–99
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01
Section One
What the Care Economy Is
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Definition
Care is the economy beneath the economy
Every market, factory and office runs on people who were fed, raised, nursed and kept well by someone. The care economy is the whole system of activities — paid and unpaid — that sustain human beings day to day and across generations.
Care economy
The sector of activity, paid and unpaid, that meets the physical, emotional and developmental needs of people — children, the sick, the elderly, persons with disabilities, and able adults — so that life and the wider economy can continue.
No worker arrives at a job site without first being cared for. Care is the precondition of all other production.
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Two Halves
Care work comes paid and unpaid
Unpaid care work
Cooking, cleaning, fetching water and fuel, childcare, caring for the sick and elderly — done within the household for no wage. Overwhelmingly done by women and girls.
Paid care work
Domestic workers, nurses, ASHAs, anganwadi workers, teachers, eldercare staff — care provided for a wage, in homes, clinics, schools and institutions.
The two are connected: when unpaid care is squeezed, demand for paid care rises — and vice versa.
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What Counts
Direct care and the work that enables it
Direct (person) care
  • Feeding and bathing a child
  • Nursing a sick relative
  • Supervising an elderly parent
  • Helping a child with schoolwork
Indirect (housework) care
  • Cooking and washing up
  • Cleaning the home
  • Fetching water and firewood
  • Shopping and household management
Both are care work. Indirect care — the cooking and fetching — is what makes direct care possible.
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The Foundation
Why care is the foundation of every other economy
01
UNPAID CARE produces & maintains people
→
02
PEOPLE supply labour to markets
→
03
MARKETS generate paid output (GDP)
→
04
GDP funds public services & more care
Economists call this the circuit of social reproduction: the market economy could not function for a single day without the care economy replenishing its workforce.
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Scale
Care work is colossal — if you count it
16.4 bn
hours of unpaid care work performed worldwide every day
ILO, Care Work and Care Jobs (2018)
76%
of all unpaid care hours worldwide are done by women
ILO (2018)
2 billion+
equivalent full-time jobs that daily unpaid care would represent at minimum wage
ILO (2018)
These are established global estimates from the ILO — care is not a marginal activity but one of the largest 'sectors' in the world economy.
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Reframe
From cost to investment
Conventional accounting treats care — childcare leave, anganwadis, eldercare — as spending to be minimised. The care-economy lens reframes it as investment in the people on whom all future output depends.
The care economy is not a drain on the 'real' economy. It is the infrastructure that makes the real economy possible.
— a core insight of feminist economics
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A Working Day
A day in two economies
Picture a rural morning. A woman rises before dawn, fetches water, lights the stove, cooks, feeds children, sees the older ones to school, tends an ailing parent — all before any 'work' the economy recognises has begun.
Hours of essential labour, all of it uncounted. The care economy is not abstract — it is the texture of daily life, mostly women's.
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Roadmap
How this course is built
Seeing & measuring
  • Why GDP makes care invisible
  • Time-use surveys and the gender gap
  • Valuing unpaid care work
Acting on it
  • The gendered division and the 5 Rs
  • Care policies and paid care work
  • Care in South Asia, and what to do
Examples are India-centric throughout — the care realities you meet in policy and practice.
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02
Section Two
The Invisibility of Care
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The Blind Spot
GDP measures the market, not the home
Gross Domestic Product counts goods and services bought and sold. The meal cooked at home for free does not count; the identical meal bought at a restaurant does. The work is the same — only the price tag differs.
Result: a vast share of the labour that keeps society alive is statistically invisible. What we do not measure, we do not value, and do not fund.
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The Rule
The SNA 'production boundary'
Production boundary (SNA)
The line drawn by the System of National Accounts — the UN rulebook for GDP — that decides which activities count as economic 'production'. Unpaid domestic and care services for one's own household sit outside it.
Crucially, the SNA does count unpaid production of goods for own use (e.g. subsistence farming, fetching water), but excludes unpaid services — cooking, cleaning, caring — from GDP.
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The Paradox
The classic paradox of national accounting
A famous illustration: if a man marries his housekeeper and stops paying her, but she does the same work, GDP falls — even though nothing about the actual work has changed.
The example, debated since the early days of national accounting, exposes the arbitrariness of the boundary: the same task is 'production' when paid and 'nothing' when unpaid.
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'Women's Work'
How care became 'not work'
The exclusion is not a neutral technicality. Care was naturalised as something women do out of love — an instinct, not labour. Calling it 'women's work' made it both invisible and unpaid.
When work is done out of love, or expected of one's gender, it is rarely counted as work at all.
— a recurring theme in feminist economics
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Who Saw It First
Feminist economists named the gap
  • Marilyn Waring — If Women Counted (1988) exposed how the SNA renders women's work invisible
  • Nancy Folbre — theorised the economics of care and 'the invisible heart'
  • Diane Elson — built the policy framework (the Rs) for acting on unpaid care
  • Shahra Razavi — mapped how care is provided across state, market, family and community
We will meet each of these thinkers again — they built the toolkit this course uses.
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Consequences
What invisibility costs
  • Care receives little public investment — it 'isn't economic'
  • Women's economic contribution is systematically understated
  • Time spent caring is mistaken for 'not working' or 'inactivity'
  • Policy is designed as if care happens for free, forever, automatically
Making care visible is the first step — you cannot redistribute or invest in what the data refuses to see.
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The Iceberg
What the headline number leaves under water
Total socially useful work: what GDP counts vs what it omits (illustrative)
Illustrative, patterned on time-use-based estimates
Illustrative split: a large share of all socially useful work is unpaid care that never enters GDP. The visible economy sits on a vast invisible one.
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Shifting Ground
The boundary is being challenged
The SNA still excludes unpaid care from headline GDP, but statisticians now build satellite accounts — parallel estimates that value household production alongside GDP without changing the core measure.
Time-use surveys, which we turn to next, are the raw material for these satellite accounts — the way care finally gets counted.
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03
Section Three
Measuring Care: Time-Use Surveys
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The Instrument
Time-use surveys make care visible
Time-use survey
A survey that asks people to account for how they spent a full day — typically in fixed time slots — capturing paid work, unpaid care, learning, leisure and rest. It is the standard tool for measuring unpaid work.
Because it records activities rather than only earnings, the time-use survey can see the cooking, cleaning and caring that GDP ignores — and reveal who does it.
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India's Survey
The India Time Use Survey, 2019
India's first national Time Use Survey (TUS) was conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) from January to December 2019. It is the authoritative source on how Indians — women and men — spend their time.
2019
first all-India TUS, conducted by NSO over a full year
MoSPI / NSO Time Use Survey 2019
~1.39 lakh
households surveyed across India
NSO TUS 2019
24 hrs
of each respondent's day recorded in 30-minute slots
NSO TUS 2019
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How It Works
Recording a day, slot by slot
01
SAMPLE households across rural & urban India
→
02
ASK each member to recount the previous day
→
03
CODE activities in 30-minute slots
→
04
CLASSIFY into paid work, unpaid care, learning, leisure, rest
The survey also captures simultaneous activities — minding a child while cooking — a reality that single-task measures miss entirely.
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The Headline
The gendered gap in unpaid work
The TUS 2019 confirmed what was long suspected: Indian women spend many times more of their day on unpaid domestic and caregiving services than men do — one of the widest such gaps measured anywhere.
~5 hrs
average daily time women (15–59) spend on unpaid domestic & care work
Illustrative, patterned on NSO TUS 2019
~30 min
average daily time men (15–59) spend on the same
Illustrative, patterned on NSO TUS 2019
The participation gap is just as stark: a large majority of women do unpaid domestic work on any given day; only a minority of men do.
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See It
Unpaid work hours by sex (illustrative)
Average minutes per day on unpaid domestic & care work, by sex
Illustrative, patterned on NSO Time Use Survey 2019
Bars are illustrative and patterned on the TUS 2019 pattern; the magnitude of the gap — women doing the large majority of unpaid care — is well established.
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Reading It Well
What the numbers do and don't say
  • Time-use data shows how much care is done, and by whom — powerfully
  • It captures simultaneous and unpaid work that GDP misses
  • But recall and social desirability can under-report men's small share or women's leisure
  • And a minute of childcare and a minute of leisure are not equivalent in wellbeing
Use time-use data to size the problem and target policy — but read it like any survey, with its limits in view.
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Rural & Urban
The gap is everywhere — with variations
The unpaid-care gender gap shows up in every setting the TUS measured — rural and urban, across states, rich and poor. Where infrastructure is thin, women's unpaid hours climb further; men's barely move.
This consistency is the point: the gap is structural, not the quirk of one region. It is built into how society assigns care.
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Why It Matters
From a survey to a budget line
Time-use data is not an academic curiosity. It is the evidence base for childcare investment, for measuring women's true workload, for designing leave policy, and for valuing unpaid care in national accounts.
Once you can count the hours, you can begin to value them — the question we turn to next.
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04
Section Four
The Value of Unpaid Care
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The Question
What is unpaid care worth?
If unpaid care were a paid sector, how large would it be? Answering this means assigning a money value to hours that, by definition, command no wage. Economists call this imputation.
Imputation
Estimating a monetary value for an activity that has no market price — here, by asking what the equivalent work would cost if it had to be bought.
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Methods
Three ways to put a price on care
MethodHow it values an hour of careTends to give
Replacement cost (generalist)Wage of a domestic worker who could do itLower estimate
Replacement cost (specialist)Wage of a nurse, cook, tutor for each taskHigher estimate
Opportunity costThe wage the carer forgoes by doing care insteadVaries by the carer's own wage
The method chosen can change the headline value several-fold — so always ask which one a figure uses.
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The Estimates
Unpaid care as a share of GDP
Across countries, valuations of unpaid care work typically land between roughly 10% and 60% of GDP, depending on the method and the country. For India, leading estimates put women's unpaid work alone at a very large share of GDP — tens of percent.
Unpaid care valued as % of GDP, under different methods (illustrative)
Illustrative, patterned on ranges in ILO & OECD valuation studies
Values are illustrative; the order of magnitude — care is worth a double-digit share of GDP — is robust across studies.
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A Concrete Sense
Bigger than most named industries
Put the share in perspective: when valued, unpaid care work would typically dwarf sectors we treat as economically central — larger than manufacturing or transport in many national exercises.
The point is not the exact percentage. It is that the single largest 'industry' in most economies is one we have chosen not to count or fund.
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Why Value It
What monetising care achieves
  • Makes the invisible visible to ministries that speak in money
  • Justifies public investment in childcare, eldercare and leave
  • Reveals the true scale of women's economic contribution
  • Lets us track whether care burdens are rising or being shared
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The Limits
Why monetising care is also dangerous
  • A money value can flatten the relational, emotional core of care
  • Replacement-wage methods anchor care to already low care wages — circular undervaluation
  • A single number invites cost-cutting once care 'has a price'
  • Valuing is not the same as paying — the carer still earns nothing
Value care to argue for investment — but never let the price tag become the whole story of why care matters.
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The Balance
Count it, but don't reduce it
Care is both an economic activity worth measuring and a human relationship that resists being priced. Hold both truths at once.
— a guiding principle for care valuation
The practical stance: use valuation to win recognition and resources, while insisting that care's worth is not exhausted by its monetary estimate.
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05
Section Five
The Gendered Division of Care
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The Pattern
Care falls on women and girls
Across cultures and income levels, unpaid care is not shared equally. It is assigned to women and girls by social norm, and reinforced by every institution from the family to the labour market.
3–10x
more time women spend on unpaid care than men, depending on the country
ILO (2018); TUS-type surveys
Girls
are drawn into fetching, cooking and sibling care earlier than boys
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Learned Early
Care roles are taught, not innate
Girls are socialised into care from childhood — helping in the kitchen, minding younger siblings, fetching water. This is not biology; it is a gendered division of labour learned and enforced over time.
The cost is direct: care duties pull girls out of school and away from play, narrowing their futures before they choose them.
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Time Poverty
Care and time poverty
Time poverty
Having too little time left for rest, learning, paid work or leisure after unavoidable unpaid work is done. A person can be income-poor and time-poor at once — and care is the main driver of women's time poverty.
Where water and fuel are far, infrastructure thin, and appliances absent, the unpaid-care day stretches longest — and falls hardest on the poorest women.
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The Second Shift
The 'second shift'
When women take paid work, they rarely shed unpaid care. They return home to a second shift of cooking, cleaning and caring — a phrase coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild.
The result is a 'double burden': paid work added on top of unpaid work, rather than in place of it. Leisure and sleep are what get squeezed.
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The Trade-off
Care burden vs joining the workforce
Female labour-force participation vs unpaid-care hours, by group (illustrative)
Illustrative, patterned on PLFS & TUS-type relationships
Illustrative pattern: the heavier the unpaid-care load, the lower women's labour-force participation tends to be. Care is a key reason India's female LFP is low.
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Intersecting
Care burdens stack with other inequalities
The care load is not the same for all women. It is heaviest where poverty, caste, rurality and lack of infrastructure intersect — the Dalit or Adivasi woman in a village without piped water carries far more than the salaried urban professional.
Care inequality is gendered and classed and casted. Policy that ignores this serves the already-advantaged first.
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Not Just Time
The mental load of care
Beyond the visible hours lies the mental load — the invisible work of planning, remembering and worrying: noticing the medicine is finished, that a child is unwell, that the elder needs a check-up. It rarely shows up in any survey.
This managerial burden of care falls almost entirely on women too — and unlike a task, it never clocks off.
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The Stakes
Why the division matters for development
  • Women's unequal care load is a root cause of low female workforce participation
  • It drives girls' school dropout and limits their attainment
  • It undermines women's health, rest and economic independence
  • Redistributing care is therefore central to gender equality — not a side issue
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06
Section Six
Care & the Macroeconomy
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The Engine
Social reproduction keeps the economy running
Social reproduction
The daily and generational work of producing and maintaining people — birthing, feeding, raising, healing, sustaining — that replenishes the labour force the market economy depends on.
The paid economy and the care economy are not separate. The first continuously draws on the second for its workers — yet rarely pays back into it.
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The Warning
Depletion: when care runs down
Depletion
The harm that accumulates when the demands of care work outstrip the resources — time, energy, health, support — available to carers. Care extracted without replenishment exhausts the people who provide it.
Just as soil erodes if farmed without rest, carers deplete if society draws on their labour without investing back. Depletion is an economic risk, not only a personal one.
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The Reframe
Care as investment, not cost
Spending on childcare, health and eldercare is routinely booked as current consumption — a cost to contain. But care builds human capital: healthy, educated, well-raised people who power future growth.
Treat care as social infrastructure — as much an investment as a road or a power line, and arguably with higher returns.
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Who Provides
The care diamond
Care is provided through four institutions — the care diamond, a framework from Shahra Razavi (UNRISD, 2007). How much each corner does, and who carries the rest, is a core policy question.
CAREprovisionSTATEMARKETFAMILYCOMMUNITY
When the state and market do little, the family corner — in practice, women — absorbs the rest.
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Each Corner
The four providers of care
CornerHow it provides careExample in India
StatePublic services, transfers, regulationAnganwadis, ASHAs, public health, maternity benefit
MarketPaid services bought by householdsCrèches, private nurses, domestic workers
FamilyUnpaid care within the householdMothers, daughters, daughters-in-law
CommunityInformal mutual supportNeighbours, kin networks, SHGs, faith groups
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Policy Choice
The diamond is a policy lever
Where care sits in the diamond is a choice, not a given. Investing in the state and supporting the market corner shifts care off the family — off women — and into shared, paid provision.
Rebalancing the diamond is exactly what the 5 Rs framework, next, is designed to do.
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The Multiplier
Care investment pays the economy back
Investing in care is not only fair — it is effective stimulus. Care services are labour-intensive, so spending creates many jobs per rupee, much of it for women, while also freeing other women to work.
Studies by the ILO and others find that investing in the care economy generates more jobs per unit of spending than equivalent investment in, say, construction.
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07
Section Seven
The 5 Rs Framework
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The Toolkit
From analysis to action: the Rs
The most influential policy framework for unpaid care began as Diane Elson's 3 Rs — Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute. The ILO later extended it with two more: Represent and Reward.
Together the 5 Rs turn the diagnosis — care is invisible and unequal — into a concrete agenda for policy and practice.
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The Five
The 5 Rs at a glance
RMeansWho proposed
RecogniseMake unpaid care visible & count itElson (3 Rs)
ReduceCut the drudgery via infrastructure & techElson (3 Rs)
RedistributeShift care from women to men & to the stateElson (3 Rs)
RepresentGive carers & care workers voiceILO addition
RewardPay & protect paid care workers decentlyILO addition
Attribution matters: Recognise–Reduce–Redistribute are Diane Elson's; Represent and Reward were added by the ILO.
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R1
Recognise
Recognise unpaid care as work — real, skilled, economically essential labour. This means measuring it (time-use surveys), naming it in policy, and valuing it in satellite accounts.
Recognition is the precondition for everything else: you cannot reduce, redistribute or reward what you refuse to see.
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R2
Reduce
Reduce the sheer drudgery of care through infrastructure and technology — piped water, clean cooking fuel (LPG), electricity, sanitation, better transport.
A tap in the home and an LPG stove can return hours a day to a woman. Schemes like Jal Jeevan Mission and Ujjwala are, in effect, care-reduction policies — even if rarely framed that way.
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R3
Redistribute
Redistribute the care that remains — from women to men within the household, and from families to the state and market. This is the hardest R, because it confronts gender norms head-on.
Within the home
Men sharing cooking, cleaning, childcare; paternity leave; changing norms about whose job care is.
To state & market
Public crèches, eldercare, school meals, anganwadis — care moved out of the household entirely.
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R4
Represent
Represent means giving carers and paid care workers a voice — in unions, collectives and policy-making — so that those who do care work help shape the rules that govern it.
Domestic-worker unions and ASHA/anganwadi collectives bargaining for pay and protection are 'Represent' in action.
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R5
Reward
Reward paid care work properly — decent wages, social protection, safe conditions and recognition of skill. Today, care jobs are among the lowest-paid and least-protected, precisely because care is undervalued.
Reward closes the loop: it insists that the people society relies on to provide care are not themselves pushed into poverty by doing it.
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Sequence
The Rs build on one another
01
RECOGNISE: see & count the care
→
02
REDUCE: cut the drudgery
→
03
REDISTRIBUTE: share what remains
→
04
REPRESENT & REWARD: voice & pay for carers
They are not a menu to pick from but a sequence — recognition unlocks the rest, and reward without representation rarely sticks.
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Using It
The 5 Rs as a programme checklist
  • Recognise: does our data even capture unpaid care?
  • Reduce: are we cutting drudgery (water, fuel, transport)?
  • Redistribute: who carries the care our programme assumes?
  • Represent: do carers have a say in the design?
  • Reward: are the care workers we rely on paid and protected?
Run any care-relevant intervention through the five Rs — gaps jump out fast.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
08
Section Eight
Care Policies
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The Levers
What care policy looks like
Care policy is the set of public actions that recognise, reduce, redistribute, represent and reward care. Its main instruments cluster around children, the elderly, leave, and income support.
01
SERVICES: childcare, eldercare, health
→
02
LEAVE: maternity, paternity, parental
→
03
TRANSFERS: maternity benefit, pensions
→
04
REGULATION: rights for care workers
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Early Childhood
Childcare & ECCE
Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) — quality care and learning for children under six — does double duty: it nurtures children and frees mothers' time for paid work, study or rest.
India's National Education Policy 2020 makes ECCE for all children up to age six a priority — a major care-policy commitment if resourced and delivered.
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India's Backbone
Anganwadis and the ICDS
The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), delivered through anganwadi centres, is one of the world's largest care programmes — offering nutrition, pre-school and health services to young children and mothers.
~14 lakh
anganwadi centres operating across India
Ministry of Women & Child Development
Under 6
the age group ICDS is designed to reach, plus pregnant & nursing mothers
Anganwadis are care infrastructure already in place — strengthening them is among the highest-leverage care investments India can make.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Time to Care
Parental leave
Paid leave lets parents care for a new child without losing income. India's Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 raised paid maternity leave to 26 weeks for eligible women in the organised sector.
But two gaps remain: it covers mainly the formal sector — a small minority of working women — and offers little statutory paternity leave, leaving care 'her' job by default.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
The Other End
Eldercare
India is ageing fast. As elders multiply and joint families shrink, eldercare is becoming a major unmet need — today carried almost entirely by families, again mostly by women.
Old-age pensions, geriatric health services and supported eldercare are an emerging frontier of care policy — one most South Asian states are barely beginning to address.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
The Safety Net
Social protection as care policy
Pensions, maternity benefits, disability support and child grants are care policy by another name — they put resources behind the people doing or receiving care, reducing the unpaid burden.
  • Maternity benefit schemes (e.g. PMMVY) support new mothers
  • Old-age and widow pensions support elder and survivor care
  • Disability allowances recognise the cost of caring for and as disabled people
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Models Abroad
What strong care systems look like
Some countries treat care as core infrastructure: universal childcare, generous and shared parental leave, public eldercare, and decently paid care workers. The Nordic countries are the best-known example.
The lesson for South Asia is not to copy a rich-country model wholesale, but to see that a high-care, high-participation equilibrium is a policy choice, not an accident of wealth.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Design Lens
Reading a policy through the care lens
  • Does it reduce unpaid drudgery, or merely add to women's day?
  • Does it redistribute care, or assume women will absorb it?
  • Is it tied to formal employment — thereby excluding most women?
  • Does it fund the care workers who actually deliver it?
A 'good' scheme that quietly relies on unpaid female time is shifting cost onto women, not solving the problem.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
09
Section Nine
Paid Care Work
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The Workforce
Who does paid care work?
Paid care work spans the home, the clinic and the classroom: domestic workers, nurses and midwives, teachers, child- and eldercare staff, and India's vast army of frontline community health and nutrition workers.
It is a heavily feminised workforce — women dominate paid care globally — which is one reason it is so persistently underpaid.
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In the Home
Domestic workers
Millions of women in India work as paid domestic workers — cooking, cleaning and caring in others' homes. Largely informal, the work is often unregulated, low-paid and without social protection.
Because it happens in private homes and is seen as 'women's work', domestic labour is among the least protected forms of employment — despite the ILO's Domestic Workers Convention (C189) setting standards for it.
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The Frontline
ASHA, anganwadi & ANM workers
India's public health and nutrition system runs on frontline women workers: ASHAs (community health), anganwadi workers (child development) and ANMs (auxiliary nurse midwives).
ASHAs are formally 'volunteers' paid through task-based incentives rather than a salary — a vivid example of essential care labour kept cheap by being classed as something other than work.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
The Penalty
The 'care penalty'
Care penalty
The wage discount attached to care jobs: even after accounting for skill and education, work involving care for people tends to pay less than comparable work — a pattern documented by Nancy Folbre and others.
The penalty is self-reinforcing: care is assumed to be a natural female trait rather than a skill, so it is paid as if anyone could do it for love — which keeps wages low and the workforce female.
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Why It Persists
Why care work stays cheap
  • Care is seen as an extension of women's 'natural' unpaid role — so 'worth less'
  • Its quality is hard to measure, so it is poorly rewarded
  • Much of it is informal, isolated, and hard to organise
  • Those who need care often cannot pay much, squeezing wages further
None of these is a law of nature. Each is a policy and norm choice that can be changed.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
The Goal
Decent work for care workers
The ILO's decent work agenda sets the standard for paid care: fair wages, social protection, safety, reasonable hours, and the right to organise — the 'Reward' and 'Represent' Rs in practice.
  • Minimum-wage coverage and timely pay
  • Social security: pensions, health, maternity
  • Recognition of skill and formal status
  • The right to unionise and bargain collectively
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The Pay Gap
Care wages sit at the bottom
Average monthly earnings by occupation, relative to all workers (illustrative)
Illustrative, patterned on care-penalty wage research
Illustrative pattern: paid care occupations cluster well below average earnings — the care penalty made visible.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
The Stakes
Why decent care jobs matter twice over
Improving paid care work is a double dividend: it lifts a large, female workforce out of low-wage precarity, and it raises the quality of the care that children, patients and elders receive.
Underpaid, exhausted carers cannot give good care. Rewarding care workers is also a way of caring for everyone they serve.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
10
Section Ten
Care in South Asia
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The Context
Care in a region in transition
South Asia carries a distinctive care profile: very high unpaid-care gender gaps, low female labour-force participation, thin public care services, and rapid demographic and social change all at once.
Understanding care here means reading these forces together — family structure, migration, ageing and informality.
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Family in Flux
Joint families and migration
The joint family once spread care across many hands. As families nuclearise and working-age members migrate for work, that informal care network frays — leaving fewer people to care for children and elders.
Migration adds a twist: women left behind may gain autonomy but also absorb all the care once shared, while migrant women may leave their own families to care for others'.
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The Crunch
The care crisis
A care crisis emerges when care demand rises (more elders, more young children needing ECCE) while supply falls (smaller families, more women in paid work, weak public services) — with no one filling the gap.
South Asia risks resolving this crisis the old way — by quietly loading still more unpaid work onto women — unless the state and market step in.
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Greying
Ageing populations
South Asian populations are ageing rapidly. India's share of people aged 60+ is projected to roughly double in the coming decades, sharply increasing the need for eldercare.
With pensions thin and eldercare services scarce, this demand will land first on families — and within families, on women — unless care policy gets ahead of it.
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A Window
NEP, ECCE and the young
At the other end of life, the region's still-large child population means early-childhood care is a present, not future, priority. India's NEP 2020 and its push on ECCE offer a real opportunity to build care infrastructure for the young.
Anganwadis upgraded into genuine ECCE centres could simultaneously support children's development and women's employment — a classic care 'double dividend'.
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The Reality
Informality shapes everything
The defining feature of South Asian care is informality: the vast majority of workers — and almost all care workers — are outside formal employment, beyond the reach of leave laws, social security and labour protection.
Policies pegged to formal jobs — like 26-week maternity leave — therefore miss most women. Care policy here must be designed for the informal majority, not the formal minority.
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The Paradox
South Asia's care paradox
South Asia presents a striking puzzle: women's education and household incomes have risen, yet female labour-force participation has stayed low — even fallen. The unequal, unsupported care burden is a leading explanation.
Growth alone has not freed women's time. Without care services and shared care at home, rising prosperity leaves the unpaid burden intact — and women out of the paid workforce.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Bright Spots
What works in the region
  • SHGs & collectives — SEWA, self-help groups organising care and domestic workers
  • Crèches at worksites — e.g. mobile crèches for construction workers' children
  • Community kitchens & school meals — reducing the daily cooking burden
  • Water & LPG schemes — Jal Jeevan, Ujjwala cutting fetching and fuel time
The building blocks of a care system already exist in the region — the task is to fund, connect and scale them.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
11
Section Eleven
Practice & Policy
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The Case
Investing in the care economy
The closing argument is simple: investing in care is one of the highest-return, most equitable investments a developing economy can make — for children, for women, for elders, and for growth itself.
Double dividend
care jobs created + other women freed to work
Human capital
healthier, better-raised, better-educated future workers
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Jobs
Care investment as a jobs engine
Jobs created per unit of public investment, by sector (illustrative)
Illustrative, patterned on ILO care-economy investment studies
Illustrative pattern, robust in direction: because care is labour-intensive, a rupee invested in care typically creates more jobs — many for women — than the same rupee in construction.
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The Returns
What care investment buys
Invest in…Immediate effectLonger-run return
Childcare / ECCEFrees mothers' time; care jobsChild development; women's earnings
EldercareRelieves family carersDignity for elders; women re-enter work
Water / fuel / sanitationCuts unpaid drudgery hoursGirls in school; women's health
Decent pay for care workersLifts a feminised workforceBetter-quality care for all
Every row delivers a care and an economic return — the heart of the 'care as investment' case.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · ImpactMojo 101 Series95www.impactmojo.in
ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
For Practitioners
What this means for your work
  • Count care — build unpaid-care questions into your baselines
  • Don't free-ride on women — check whose unpaid time your programme assumes
  • Reduce drudgery — water, fuel and childcare are care policy
  • Reward care workers — the ASHAs and anganwadi staff you rely on deserve decent pay
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
For Policy
An agenda for care
  • Fund ECCE and anganwadis as genuine care infrastructure
  • Extend leave and maternity benefits to informal workers
  • Build eldercare ahead of the ageing wave
  • Formalise, pay and protect the paid-care workforce
  • Invest in water, fuel and sanitation to cut unpaid hours
Every item maps to an R — the framework doubles as a policy to-do list.
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Keep Learning
A short reading list
  • The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values — Nancy Folbre
  • Who Pays for the Kids? — Nancy Folbre (the economics of care)
  • Diane Elson — the 'Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute' framework
  • Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work — ILO (2018)
  • Shahra Razavi — the 'care diamond' (UNRISD, 2007)
Pair this deck with ImpactMojo's Feminist Economics, Gender & Development and Social Protection 101 courses.
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The Takeaways
If you remember five things
  • Care is the economy beneath the economy — everything rests on it
  • GDP hides unpaid care — the SNA boundary leaves it out
  • Care falls on women and girls — unequally, and at a cost
  • The 5 Rs are the toolkit — Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute, Represent, Reward
  • Care is investment, not cost — and a powerful jobs engine
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ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in
Care Economy 101 · Complete
Now go make
care count.
The work that holds everything else up has been invisible for too long. Recognise it, reduce it, redistribute it, represent and reward those who do it — and build the care economy your community already depends on. Explore the rest of the ImpactMojo 101 Series, free forever.
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