ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Agenda

What We Cover

What the Care Economy Is

Slides 3–11

The Invisibility of Care

Slides 12–20

Measuring Care: Time-Use Surveys

Slides 21–29

The Value of Unpaid Care

Slides 30–37

The Gendered Division of Care

Slides 38–46

Care & the Macroeconomy

Slides 47–54

The 5 Rs Framework

Slides 55–64

Care Policies

Slides 65–73

Paid Care Work

Slides 74–82

Care in South Asia

Slides 83–91

Practice & Policy

Slides 92–99

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section One

What the Care Economy Is

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Care economy includes	Counted in GDP?
Unpaid domestic work at home	No
Unpaid care of children and elders	No
Paid domestic work	Yes, if recorded
Nurses, teachers, childcare staff	Yes
Frontline honorarium workers	Partly, ambiguously

The last row is where the categories break down. ASHAs are described as volunteers, paid an honorarium, doing work the health system depends on — neither clearly unpaid nor clearly employed.

That ambiguity is not accidental. Classifying the work as voluntary is what makes it affordable, and it is contested by the workers themselves.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

	Unpaid care	Paid care
Who does it	Women and girls, overwhelmingly	Women, overwhelmingly
Where	The household	Homes, clinics, schools, centres
Counted	No	Partly
Protected	Not at all	Rarely — mostly informal
Paid	No	Below comparable work

Read the columns together and the pattern is one thing, not two: work coded as care is done by women and is either unpaid or underpaid, whichever side of the household boundary it sits on.

That is the core claim of care economics, and it is what makes the paid and unpaid halves a single subject rather than two.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Type of care	Substitutable by a service?
Feeding and bathing a child	Partly — a crèche
Nursing a sick relative	Partly — home nursing
Supervising an elderly parent	Hard; requires presence
Cooking and cleaning	Yes — and commonly is
Fetching water and fuel	Yes — by infrastructure

The bottom two rows are where policy has most traction, because they can be reduced by infrastructure rather than redistributed between people.

Supervision is the most under-recognised category: hours spent being available, unable to leave, which time-use instruments capture badly and which is real constraint.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

The Foundation

Why care is the foundation of every other economy

UNPAID CARE produces & maintains people

→

PEOPLE supply labour to markets

→

MARKETS generate paid output (GDP)

→

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.

Step in the circuit	What happens if it fails
Care produces and maintains people	The labour force is not replenished
People supply labour	Output falls
Markets generate output	Revenue falls
Revenue funds services and care	Care load returns to households

The circuit closes: when public services contract, the work does not disappear — it moves back into households, and within households onto women.

That is the mechanism behind the standard finding that austerity has a gendered incidence even when the budget lines cut are gender-neutral.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

ILO 2018 figure	What it is
16.4 billion hours a day	Global unpaid care work
76% of those hours	Done by women
2 billion full-time-equivalent jobs	At minimum wage, if paid
About 9% of global GDP	A common valuation estimate

These come from Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (ILO, 2018), which remains the standard global reference and states its methods openly.

Cite the source and the year with the number. Care estimates vary substantially by method, and a figure quoted without its basis invites a methodological dismissal.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

Treated as cost	Treated as investment
Childcare spending	Enables mothers’ earnings and child development
Maternity benefit	Retains women in the workforce
Eldercare services	Releases family carers to work
Water and fuel infrastructure	Returns hours to households

The reframing is not rhetorical. Whether a budget line sits in current consumption or in capital changes how it is appraised and how easily it is cut.

Where you can, make the argument in the accounting language the finance ministry uses. Care as human-capital investment travels further than care as a right in that room.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Before "work" begins	Hours it takes
Fetching water	Where there is no tap
Lighting a fire and cooking	Where there is no LPG
Feeding and readying children	Every day
Tending an ill relative	Unpredictable, unbounded

Every item on this list is displaced by infrastructure or shared by another person. None of it is displaced by exhortation, which is why the Reduce and Redistribute Rs are separate.

A programme that asks for two hours a week from this day is competing with sleep, with paid work, or with a daughter’s schooling. Ask which.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Two

The Invisibility of Care

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Same work	Counted?
A meal cooked at home	No
The same meal in a restaurant	Yes
Childcare by a mother	No
Childcare in a crèche	Yes
Water fetched from a well	No
Water delivered by a utility	Yes

The boundary is not about the nature of the work. It is about whether money changed hands, which is a measurement convention rather than an economic judgement.

One consequence is perverse: as services commercialise, GDP rises without any new work being done. The work simply crossed the line.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Inside the boundary	Outside it
Market production	Unpaid domestic services
Own-account production of goods	Unpaid care of household members
Subsistence farming	Unpaid volunteering in some cases

Note the asymmetry in the first two rows: growing food for your own household counts as production; cooking it for your own household does not.

The distinction is defended on measurement grounds — goods are countable, services within a household are not — and time-use surveys have weakened that defence considerably.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Before	After	GDP
Housekeeper paid a wage	Same work, unpaid spouse	Falls
Meals bought	Meals cooked at home	Falls
Childcare purchased	Grandmother does it	Falls

The paradox is usually attributed to Pigou and has been argued over since the early days of national accounting. It has never been resolved because the boundary is a convention, not a finding.

The practical consequence is that GDP moves when work crosses the household line, which makes it a poor measure of how much work is being done.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

'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

Naturalising care as love	Consequence
It becomes an instinct, not a skill	No training, no ladder, no pay
Refusing it becomes a moral failing	Bargaining power disappears
It cannot be bought, so has no price	And so no budget line
It is nobody’s job, so everybody assumes it	Programmes free-ride on it

The last row is the operational point for a development practitioner: designs that assume women will contribute unpaid time are relying on this framing to work.

The framing also travels into paid care, which is why the care penalty exists: work coded as love is priced as though it were not skilled.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Thinker	Contribution
Marilyn Waring	Showed how the SNA renders women’s work invisible
Nancy Folbre	The economics of care; the care penalty
Diane Elson	Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute
Shahra Razavi	The care diamond
Arlie Hochschild	The second shift

If Women Counted (1988) came out of Waring’s experience as a member of parliament confronting national accounts that had no place for most of what women did.

Elson’s three Rs are the most policy-portable output of this literature and have been adopted, with the ILO’s two additions, into mainstream policy language.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Because care is invisible	A programme
It gets no budget line	Assumes it happens for free
Women appear "not working"	Targets them as available
Time is not measured	Schedules activities they cannot attend
Care is nobody’s remit	Adds to it without noticing

These are design consequences, not just accounting ones. An invisible input is one that no design process asks about, so its supply is assumed to be unlimited.

Adding two time-use questions to a baseline is the cheapest correction available and is almost never done.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Above the water	Below it
Market production	Unpaid domestic work
Recorded services	Unpaid care of people

Estimates vary by method; every serious one places a large share of socially useful work below the line.

The submerged part is not idle: it produces the people the visible part employs.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Change	Status
Satellite accounts for household production	Produced in a number of countries
Time-use surveys as regular instruments	India: 2019 and 2024 rounds
Unpaid care in headline GDP	Still excluded
Care in national policy frameworks	Growing

A satellite account values household production alongside GDP without altering the headline number, which is the compromise statisticians reached between visibility and comparability.

For advocacy the satellite account is usually enough: it produces an official number that can be cited without requiring the SNA itself to change.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Three

Measuring Care: Time-Use Surveys

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

A time-use survey captures	Which no other instrument does
The full 24 hours	Including sleep and rest
Unpaid work by activity	Not just "did you work"
Simultaneous activities	Childcare while cooking
Who in the household	Not the household as a unit
Weekday and weekend variation	Where sampled for it

The third row is where care is most often lost. Supervising a child while doing something else is real constraint and is invisible to any instrument that records one activity per slot.

Where a survey records a primary and a secondary activity, the care total roughly doubles. Check which convention produced any figure you cite.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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; a second round followed in 2024 (results released February 2025). Together they are 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

India TUS	Detail
Conducted by	National Statistical Office
First national round	January to December 2019
Second round	2024, results released February 2025
Basis	Full 24-hour recall, coded activities
Use	Unpaid care, time poverty, satellite accounts

Two rounds five years apart make change measurable for the first time in India, which is a substantial advance over a single snapshot.

When citing, name the round. Comparisons between the two require attention to any change in the instrument, and the reports document it.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

How It Works

Recording a day, slot by slot

SAMPLE households across rural & urban India

→

ASK each member to recount the previous day

→

CODE activities in 30-minute slots

→

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.

Method choice	What it affects
Previous-day recall	Accuracy versus a diary’s burden
30-minute slots	Short activities may be missed
Secondary activity recorded	Whether simultaneous care counts
Who is interviewed	Proxy reporting distorts the split

Proxy reporting is the largest hazard: if one person reports for the whole household, the reported division of labour reflects the norm rather than the day.

Individual recall from each member is the standard the instrument aims at, and departures from it should be read as likely to understate women’s hours.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

What the gap means	Practically
Hours unavailable for paid work	A constraint on participation
Hours unavailable for study	A constraint on girls’ attainment
Hours unavailable for rest	A health cost
Hours unavailable to attend anything	A constraint on your programme

The gap is among the widest measured anywhere, and it is stable across settings within India, which suggests norm rather than circumstance is the main driver.

For design the last row is the operative one: a large unpaid-care load is why an activity scheduled at eleven in the morning reaches the women it does.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

The gap holds across	Which suggests
Rural and urban	Not an artefact of setting
States	Not a regional culture

A pattern holding across every cut of the data is evidence of a norm, which is why redistribution needs norm work and not only services.

The size varies with infrastructure and services; the direction does not vary at all.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Time-use data does	Does not
Quantify unpaid work by sex	Explain why the division exists
Reveal time poverty	Value the work
Capture simultaneous activity	Capture the mental load
Support satellite accounts	Settle what should be counted

Recall and social desirability both push in the same direction, so a reported gap should generally be read as a lower bound rather than a precise figure.

The mental load — planning, remembering, anticipating — is the clearest thing the instrument cannot see, and it is a real component of the burden.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Where infrastructure is thin	Effect on hours
No piped water	Fetching adds hours a day
No LPG	Fuel collection and slower cooking
No electricity	Tasks confined to daylight
No sanitation	Time and safety costs

Men’s unpaid hours barely move across these settings, which is the finding that makes the division of labour look like a norm rather than a response to conditions.

It also identifies the highest-return interventions: infrastructure reduces the total, and only redistribution changes the share.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Time-use evidence supports	Concretely
Childcare investment	How many hours it would release
Leave policy design	What a realistic entitlement looks like
Infrastructure prioritisation	Which service returns most time
Satellite accounts	The hours to be valued
Programme design	When people are actually available

Nothing on this list requires new data collection once a national round exists. The evidence is public, and the constraint is that it is rarely consulted at design.

Read the TUS tables for your own state before designing an activity schedule. It takes an hour and changes what you propose.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Four

The Value of Unpaid Care

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Imputation requires deciding	And each choice moves the answer
Which activities to value	Direct care only, or housework too
Whose wage to use	Generalist or specialist
Whether to value simultaneous time	Doubles some totals
Whether to include supervision	Large, contested

Because each choice moves the total substantially, published estimates for the same country legitimately range widely, and none is the true figure.

Report the method alongside the number, and prefer a range to a point estimate. A single confident figure will be attacked on its assumptions.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Methods

Three ways to put a price on care

Method	How it values an hour of care	Tends to give
Replacement cost (generalist)	Wage of a domestic worker who could do it	Lower estimate
Replacement cost (specialist)	Wage of a nurse, cook, tutor for each task	Higher estimate
Opportunity cost	The wage the carer forgoes by doing care instead	Varies by the carer's own wage

The method chosen can change the headline value several-fold — so always ask which one a figure uses.

Method	Logic	Weakness
Replacement, generalist	What a domestic worker would charge	Anchored to a suppressed wage
Replacement, specialist	A nurse, cook or tutor per task	Overstates for untrained work
Opportunity cost	What the carer forgoes	Values a graduate’s hour above a labourer’s

The opportunity-cost method has an uncomfortable property: it implies an hour of childcare by a well-paid woman is worth more than the same hour by a poor one.

Most official exercises use generalist replacement cost, which is conservative and produces the lower bound — worth saying when you cite the number.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Estimate range	Driven by
About 10% of GDP	Narrow activity list, generalist wage

The spread is not disagreement about facts. It follows arithmetically from the method choices on the previous slide.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Why the comparison helps	Why to use it carefully
It makes an abstract share concrete	The sectors are not equivalent
It reaches finance audiences	It invites a methodological fight
It justifies a budget line	A price can become a ceiling

The comparison to named sectors is rhetorically effective and is the point at which a sceptical economist will ask about the method. Have the answer ready.

The purpose is recognition, not a ranking. Nothing follows from care being "bigger than manufacturing" unless a policy decision hangs on it.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Risk of monetising	How it shows up
Flattens the relational core	Care becomes a service unit
Anchors to low care wages	Circular undervaluation
A price invites cost-cutting	Once measured, it can be squeezed
One number replaces the analysis	The distribution disappears

The circularity is the sharpest of these: valuing unpaid care at the domestic-worker wage prices it at a rate that is itself depressed because the work is coded as care.

Use valuation to win recognition and budget, and keep the hours and the distribution in view. The number is an argument, not the finding.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Five

The Gendered Division of Care

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

Institution	How it reinforces the division
Family	Assigns tasks by gender from childhood
School	Girls absent for care; curricula assume it
Labour market	Penalises interruption; part-time is precarious
Public services	Designed assuming a carer is available
Policy	Leave attached to mothers, not parents

The pattern is over-determined: no single institution has to enforce it, because each one assumes the others already have.

That is also why single-point interventions disappoint. A crèche helps; a crèche plus school timings plus transport plus shared leave changes the arithmetic of a day.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Learned early	Measurable cost
Girls mind younger siblings	Absence and dropout
Girls help with cooking and fetching	Study time lost
Boys are exempted	No care skills acquired
The pattern is modelled at home	Reproduced in the next generation

The third row matters for redistribution: a generation of men who were never expected to care do not acquire the skills or the habit, which makes later sharing harder.

Programmes that engage boys in care tasks are addressing supply for the next generation, which is slow and is one of the few things that shifts the norm.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Time poverty means	Even when
Too little time for rest	Income has risen
Too little for paid work	Jobs are available
Too little for study	School is free and near
Too little for treatment or travel	The service exists

A person can be income-poor and time-poor at once, and the two respond to different interventions. Cash does not buy time back where services do not exist to buy.

Measuring time poverty requires a threshold decision — how much discretionary time counts as enough — which is a judgement and should be stated.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Adding paid work	What is not subtracted
Cooking	Still hers
Childcare	Still hers
Elder care	Still hers
The mental load	Entirely hers

Hochschild’s finding was that paid work adds to the day rather than replacing part of it, and the pattern has been replicated in time-use data across many countries.

This is the strongest argument for the Reduce and Redistribute Rs together: increasing women’s paid work without addressing care produces a longer day, not a better one.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Relationship shown	What it does not establish
Heavier care load, lower participation	Which causes which
Consistent across groups	That care alone explains it
Visible in PLFS and TUS together	The size of the effect

The association is well established and the causal direction runs both ways: care limits participation, and women out of paid work absorb more care.

The policy reading does not depend on resolving that. Reducing and redistributing care relaxes the constraint whichever direction dominates.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Intersection	Effect on the care load
Poverty	No purchased substitutes
Rurality	Water, fuel and distance add hours
Caste	Which work is assigned, and to whom
Disability in the household	Intensive, unbounded care
Migration of adults	Fewer hands, same demand

The average unpaid-care figure conceals an enormous range. The woman at the intersection of several of these rows carries a load the national number does not describe.

Disaggregate care data by at least two axes wherever the sample allows. The mean tells you the gap exists; the crossing tells you where to act.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Mental load task	Visible in a time-use diary?
Noticing the medicine is finished	No
Remembering the immunisation date	No
Planning meals around what is available	No
Being available in case	Partly, as supervision

The mental load is cognitive and continuous, so it fails the basic requirement of a diary instrument: it does not occupy a slot.

It also does not redistribute when tasks do. A household where a man cooks on request while a woman decides what is cooked has shared the task and not the load.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

Consequence of the unequal load	Evidence base
Low female labour-force participation	PLFS alongside TUS
Girls’ dropout	Education and household surveys
Women’s health and rest deficit	Time-use and health data
Limited economic independence	Asset and account data

Each row can be evidenced from public Indian data, which matters when the claim is challenged as ideological rather than empirical.

Redistribution is presented last in most treatments and is the one with the largest potential effect, because it changes the share rather than the total.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Six

Care & the Macroeconomy

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Social reproduction includes	Who currently absorbs it
Daily replenishment: food, rest, health	Households, mostly women
Generational: bearing and raising children	Households, mostly women
Care during illness and old age	Households, mostly women
Maintaining social ties and community	Households, mostly women

The concept comes from feminist political economy and names the work the market economy depends on and does not pay for, at any point in the cycle.

Its analytical value is that it makes the dependency visible in both directions: markets rely on care, and care relies on the incomes markets provide.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Depletion shows as	Observable in
Health deterioration	Anaemia, chronic conditions
Exhaustion and sleep deficit	Time-use residual
Withdrawal from paid work	Participation data
Reduced care quality	Child and elder outcomes

Depletion is Shirin Rai and colleagues’ term for what accumulates when care demands exceed the resources available to meet them, and it is measurable in principle.

Programmes that increase demands on carers without replenishment — a new committee, a new register, a new meeting — are drawing on this account.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Booked as	Consequence in the budget
Current consumption	A cost to contain; first to be cut
Investment in human capital	Appraised against long-run returns

The accounting classification is not neutral. It determines which appraisal method applies, and therefore whether long-run returns can be counted at all.

Several governments and international bodies have begun to argue for care as social infrastructure precisely to move it across this line.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

When the state and market do little, the family corner — in practice, women — absorbs the rest.

Corner	Who pays	Who does the work
State	Taxpayers	Public and honorarium workers

Razavi’s framework (UNRISD, 2007) makes the distribution a visible policy choice rather than a fact about a society.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Each Corner

The four providers of care

Corner	How it provides care	Example in India
State	Public services, transfers, regulation	Anganwadis, ASHAs, public health, maternity benefit
Market	Paid services bought by households	Crèches, private nurses, domestic workers
Family	Unpaid care within the household	Mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law
Community	Informal mutual support	Neighbours, kin networks, SHGs, faith groups

Corner	India example	Limit
State	Anganwadi, ASHA, public health	Coverage and quality
Market	Crèches, private nurses, domestic work	Affordability
Family	Unpaid care, mostly women	Depletion
Community	SHGs, neighbours, mutual aid	Unpaid and fragile

The family corner absorbs whatever the other three do not, which is why it is the residual rather than a choice made by anyone.

Community provision is often counted as a solution and is usually unpaid women’s work under another name. Check who is doing it before crediting it.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Shift care toward	Requires
The state	Public spending and staffing
The market	Affordability, or subsidy
Men within families	Norm change and leave design
The community	Paying for what is now unpaid

Only the first two are directly purchasable, which is why care policy debates concentrate there even though the family corner carries the largest share.

Rebalancing is a distributional decision. Saying which corner you are shifting care to, and who pays, is the substance of a care policy.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Why care investment is effective stimulus	Mechanism
Labour-intensive	More jobs per unit of spending
Jobs go largely to women	Raises women’s employment directly
Frees other women’s time	Raises participation indirectly
Low import content	Spending stays in the domestic economy

Modelling studies from the ILO and others find care investment creates substantially more jobs per unit than construction, with a much larger share going to women.

The last row is the one that matters in a macroeconomic argument: care spending leaks abroad far less than capital-intensive alternatives.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Seven

The 5 Rs Framework

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

R	Origin	Hardest part
Recognise	Elson	Getting the measurement funded
Reduce	Elson	Infrastructure capital cost
Redistribute	Elson	Confronting norms
Represent	ILO	Organising an isolated workforce
Reward	ILO	Paying for what was assumed free

The framework is popular partly because it maps onto instruments: measurement, infrastructure, services and norms, labour rights, and wages.

It is not a menu. Reduce without Redistribute lowers the total and leaves the share unchanged; Recognise without either produces a report.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

The Five

The 5 Rs at a glance

R	Means	Who proposed
Recognise	Make unpaid care visible & count it	Elson (3 Rs)
Reduce	Cut the drudgery via infrastructure & tech	Elson (3 Rs)
Redistribute	Shift care from women to men & to the state	Elson (3 Rs)
Represent	Give carers & care workers voice	ILO addition
Reward	Pay & protect paid care workers decently	ILO addition

Attribution matters: Recognise–Reduce–Redistribute are Diane Elson's; Represent and Reward were added by the ILO.

R	Typical instrument	Typical failure
Recognise	Time-use survey	Measured, then shelved
Reduce	Water, fuel, transport	Hours released, share unchanged
Redistribute	Services and shared leave	Underfunded; norms untouched
Represent	Unions and collectives	Consultation without authority
Reward	Wages and protection	Honoraria instead of pay

Each R has a characteristic way of being done nominally, and knowing them makes it possible to audit a care policy rather than accept its self-description.

The clearest test across all five is money: which Rs have a budget line, and how large it is relative to the claim.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Recognition instrument	What it produces
Time-use survey	Hours, by sex and activity
Satellite account	A monetary value alongside GDP
Care questions in programme baselines	Local evidence
Naming care in policy documents	A mandate to act

Recognition is the precondition and is frequently mistaken for the whole agenda. A country can measure care meticulously and redistribute none of it.

For a practitioner the third row is the one you control: two time-use questions in your own baseline make the care load in your programme area visible.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Infrastructure	Hours it can return
Piped water at home	Large where collection is distant
LPG or clean cooking fuel	Collection plus cooking time
Electricity	Extends usable hours; enables appliances
Sanitation at home	Time and safety
Reliable transport	Access to services and work

Reduce is the R with the clearest evidence and the most straightforward delivery, because it works through capital investment rather than through changing behaviour.

It also has a limit worth naming: reducing drudgery does not touch the share, and hours released can be absorbed by other unpaid work rather than by rest or earning.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Redistribute from	To	Instrument
Women	Men	Shared and non-transferable leave; norms work
Families	The state	Public childcare and eldercare
Families	The market	Affordable services, subsidised
Households	The community	Only if it is paid

Non-transferable paternity or parental leave is the instrument with the best evidence for shifting the within-household share, because take-up rises sharply when the entitlement is lost if unused.

This is the hardest R because it is the only one that requires someone to do more of something. That is why it is usually last and least funded.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Represent means	Example
Carers in policy-making	Consultation with real authority
Paid care workers organised	Domestic-worker unions
Frontline workers bargaining	ASHA and anganwadi collectives
Care users’ voice	Elders and disabled people on their own terms

Representation is what makes the other Rs durable, because it creates a constituency that will defend a care budget line when it comes under pressure.

The last row is regularly omitted: care policy is written about elders and disabled people far more often than with them.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Reward means	Concretely
Decent wages	Not honoraria for full-time work
Social protection	Pension, insurance, leave
Safe conditions	Especially in private homes
Recognition of skill	Training, certification, a career path

The first row is a live dispute in India, where frontline workers doing sustained, required work are classified as volunteers and paid an honorarium.

Reward closes the loop the whole course describes: the care penalty exists because care is undervalued, and paying properly is what contradicts the valuation.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Sequence

The Rs build on one another

RECOGNISE: see & count the care

→

REDUCE: cut the drudgery

→

REDISTRIBUTE: share what remains

→

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.

If you skip	You get
Recognise	No evidence base; no budget argument
Reduce	Redistribution of an unnecessarily large total
Redistribute	A smaller burden, same share
Represent	Policy that does not survive a budget cycle
Reward	A care workforce that cannot be sustained

The sequence is not rigid, but the dependencies are real: you cannot redistribute what has not been recognised, and reduction is cheaper than redistribution.

Most national care policies stop after the second R, which is why measured care burdens fall slowly while the gender share barely moves.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Checklist question	A failing answer
Does our data capture unpaid care?	"We ask about employment"
Are we cutting drudgery?	"That is infrastructure, not our sector"
Who carries the care we assume?	"Volunteers"
Do carers have a say?	"We consulted the community"
Are care workers paid properly?	"They receive an honorarium"

Run this on your own programme design. Most designs fail the third question, and failing it is what makes the others academic.

The five questions take ten minutes at a design meeting and are the practical form of everything in this course.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Eight

Care Policies

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

SERVICES: childcare, eldercare, health

→

LEAVE: maternity, paternity, parental

→

TRANSFERS: maternity benefit, pensions

→

REGULATION: rights for care workers

Instrument	Which R it serves
Childcare and ECCE services	Redistribute
Water, fuel, transport	Reduce
Parental leave	Redistribute
Care worker wages and protection	Reward
Time-use measurement	Recognise

Mapping instruments to Rs is a quick way to audit a national care policy: most cluster in one or two, and the gaps are usually Represent and Reward.

Income support belongs across several. A cash transfer can reduce a purchased-service constraint, or substitute for a service that should exist.

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.

ECCE does	Provided that
Supports child development	Quality and staffing are adequate
Frees maternal time	Hours match a working day
Creates care jobs	They are paid properly
Prepares children for school	It is education, not custody

The hours condition is decisive and frequently unmet: a centre open for three hours does not enable paid work, however good it is for the child.

NEP 2020 brought ECCE into the formal education framework, which is a real opening — and the delivery question remains anganwadi capacity and staffing.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

ICDS provides	Constraint
Supplementary nutrition	Supply and quality
Pre-school education	Worker time split across roles
Health and referral services	Coordination with the health system
A universal-in-principle network	Infrastructure and staffing

The anganwadi worker carries nutrition, pre-school, health outreach and a growing reporting burden, usually alone or with one helper, for an honorarium.

Any proposal to expand what anganwadis deliver is a proposal to add to that person’s day. Say so, and cost it, or the expansion is unfunded by design.

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.

Maternity Benefit Act, 2017	Gap
26 weeks paid leave	Organised-sector employees only
Creche duty above a size threshold	Enforcement is uneven
Applies to mothers	No comparable paternity entitlement
Cost falls on the employer	Argued effect on hiring women

The two gaps compound: coverage excludes the vast majority of working women in India, and the entitlement is attached to mothers, so it does not redistribute.

Maternity benefit schemes for informal workers exist and are far smaller in value. The design question is whether the entitlement follows the job or the person.

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.

Eldercare need	Current provision
Daily assistance	Family, mostly women
Geriatric health services	Thin and urban-concentrated
Income in old age	Pensions, low in value
Supported living	Almost entirely private

Eldercare is where the care crisis will arrive fastest, because the demographic change is already determined and the provision is almost entirely familial.

It also falls on women twice: as the carers, and as the majority of the very old, who are more likely to be widowed and without income.

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

Social protection instrument	Care function
Old-age pension	Reduces dependence on family carers
Maternity benefit	Income during a care period
Disability support	Funds care that families otherwise absorb
Child grants	Offsets the cost of raising children

None of these is labelled care policy in most budgets, and all four determine how much unpaid care a household must supply.

Reading the social protection budget as care policy is a useful exercise: it usually reveals more care spending than the care line does, and more gaps.

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.

Strong care system feature	Why it matters
Universal childcare	Access does not depend on income
Non-transferable parental leave	Take-up by fathers rises sharply
Public eldercare	Removes the residual from families
Decently paid care workforce	Sustains quality and supply

The Nordic systems are the usual reference and were built over decades with a tax base that few developing economies have. The lesson is directional rather than a template.

The transferable point is the second row: making a portion of leave non-transferable is a low-cost design change with well-documented effects on the within-household share.

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.

Ask of a policy	A failing answer
Does it reduce unpaid work?	"It raises awareness"
Does it redistribute care?	"Women will be supported"
Is it tied to formal employment?	"It covers employees"
Does it fund the care workforce?	"Volunteers will deliver it"

The third question is the decisive one in South Asia, where entitlements attached to formal employment reach a small minority of working women.

The fourth is the free-riding test. A policy delivered by unpaid or honorarium workers is transferring cost rather than funding care.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Nine

Paid Care Work

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Paid care occupation	Formal?
Domestic worker	Rarely
ASHA	Classified as volunteer
Anganwadi worker	Honorarium
Nurse, midwife	Often, in public facilities
Private crèche staff	Rarely

Most of India’s paid care workforce sits outside formal employment, which means outside minimum wage, social security and the enforcement machinery attached to them.

The classification is the policy. Whether a worker is called an employee, a volunteer or self-employed determines everything that follows.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Domestic work is hard to regulate because	Consequence
The workplace is a private home	Inspection is impractical
The employer is a household	No HR, no contract
Work is often live-in	No boundary on hours
Workers are isolated	Collective action is difficult

ILO Convention 189 sets standards for domestic workers, and ratification and enforcement remain limited. Several Indian states have brought domestic work under minimum-wage schedules.

Organising has nonetheless worked where it has been sustained — SEWA and domestic-worker unions are the clearest South Asian examples.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Frontline worker	Status	Contested on
ASHA	Volunteer, task-based incentives	Wages, regularisation
Anganwadi worker	Honorarium	Wages, pension
ANM	Salaried, usually	Workload, vacancies

These workers deliver a large share of India’s primary health and nutrition outreach, and their status has been the subject of sustained collective action and litigation.

For a practitioner the practical point is narrower: any programme routed through them is adding to a day that is already full and often unpaid.

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.

Care penalty means	Evidence
Care jobs pay less	After controlling for skill and education
The gap persists across countries	Documented in comparative studies
It applies to men in care jobs too	The penalty attaches to the work
It compounds with the gender pay gap	Care jobs are largely women’s

The third row is the strongest evidence that the penalty attaches to the occupation rather than to who does it: men in care occupations earn less than comparable men elsewhere.

Folbre’s explanation is that care produces benefits that spill over to people who do not pay for them, so the market price sits below the social value.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Why care stays cheap	What would change it
Seen as natural, not skilled	Certification and career paths
Quality is hard to measure	Standards and inspection
Informal and isolated	Organising and registration
Users cannot pay	Public funding

The fourth row is decisive and is why care wages will not rise through market pressure: those who need care most are least able to pay for it.

That makes care wages a public-finance question rather than a labour-market one, which is where the argument has to be made.

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

Decent work element	Care-specific difficulty
Fair wages	Employer is a household or the state
Social protection	Informal status excludes
Safety	Private homes; isolation
Reasonable hours	Live-in and on-call work
Right to organise	Dispersed workforce

Each row has an ordinary answer in factory employment and a hard one in care, which is why care work needs specific instruments rather than general labour law.

Registration is usually the first practical step: a worker who is not recorded anywhere cannot be reached by any of the other four.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Occupation	Position in the earnings distribution
Domestic work	Near the bottom
Frontline health and nutrition	Honorarium, below wage floors

Care occupations sit below average earnings as a group — what the care-penalty literature measures.

Because users cannot pay more, the level is set by public funding, not by demand.

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.

Improving paid care	Second dividend
Lifts a large female workforce	Out of low-wage precarity
Raises care quality	For children, patients and elders
Reduces turnover	Continuity of care
Attracts and retains skill	Better outcomes

Underpaid and exhausted carers deliver worse care, so the wage question is a quality question as well as a justice one — which is the argument that reaches service ministries.

Turnover is the measurable link between the two. Where it is high, the case for pay can be made in terms of continuity and training cost.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Ten

Care in South Asia

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

South Asian feature	Consequence
Very wide unpaid-care gender gap	Little discretionary time for women
Low female labour-force participation	Care is a leading explanation
Thin public care services	Family absorbs the residual
High informality	Entitlements do not reach most women
Rapid demographic change	Demand rising as supply falls

The five interact rather than adding up. Thin services plus high informality means neither the state nor the employer is a route to care support for most women.

That is why South Asian care policy has to reach people through residence and citizenship rather than through employment, which is a different design problem.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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'.

Change	Effect on care supply
Nuclearisation of households	Fewer hands per household
Male out-migration	Care and farm work fall on women who remain
Female migration for work	Care chains: care transferred to others
Rising longevity	Longer periods of eldercare

The third row names global care chains: a woman migrating for paid care work leaves care needs behind, usually filled by another woman further down the chain.

Left-behind households are a distinctive South Asian pattern, and the care and agricultural work that shifts to women who remain is rarely counted as a migration effect.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Demand rising	Supply falling
More elders	Smaller households
ECCE expectations	More women in paid work
Longer illness episodes	Migration of adults
Higher care standards	Thin public provision

A care crisis is the gap between these two columns, and the question is only who absorbs it. Historically the answer has been women, at the cost of their own participation and health.

The alternative resolutions — public provision, affordable market services, redistribution within households — all require a decision. The default requires none.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Ageing consequence	Policy needed now
More people over 60	Geriatric services and training
Longer periods of frailty	Supported living and home care
Thin pension coverage	Income security in old age
Family carers ageing too	A paid eldercare workforce

Eldercare infrastructure takes a decade to build and the demographic transition is already under way, which makes this the clearest case for acting ahead of demand.

The workforce is the binding constraint rather than the buildings. Training and paying eldercare workers is where the lead time is longest.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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'.

ECCE opportunity	What it requires
NEP 2020 brings under-6 into the framework	Funding and staffing
Anganwadi network already exists	Upgrading, not building from nothing
Large child population now	Acting within this window
Double dividend	Hours that match a working day

The existing anganwadi network is the asset that makes rapid ECCE expansion plausible in India, and its workers are the constraint on how much more it can carry.

The window is real: the child population is large now and will shrink. Infrastructure built for it will later be available for eldercare demand.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Informality means	Which excludes women from
No employer of record	Maternity benefit
No contract	Leave entitlements
No social security registration	Pension and insurance
No inspection	Wage and safety enforcement

Because the great majority of Indian women who work do so informally, every entitlement designed around formal employment reaches a small minority of them.

Universal or residence-based provision is the design response, and it is more expensive per head and reaches the people employment-linked schemes cannot.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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.

Rising	Yet participation flat or falling
Women’s education	The care load did not fall
Household incomes	Withdrawal from distress work
Urbanisation	Fewer home-based options
Service-sector growth	Jobs not accessible without care support

The paradox has several proposed explanations and the unequal, unsupported care burden is among the strongest. PLFS and TUS together are the domestic evidence base.

The recent reported uptick is largely rural self-employment, which is worth reading carefully: a rise in the participation rate is not automatically a rise in good work.

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.

What works	Why
SEWA and worker collectives	Organise an isolated workforce
Worksite and mobile crèches	Care where the work is
Community kitchens, school meals	Reduce daily cooking time
Water and LPG programmes	Return hours directly
SHG federations	Deliver and demand services

The crèche examples matter because they solve the hours problem: care located at the worksite, for the duration of the shift, is what makes paid work possible.

Each of these exists at scale somewhere in the region. The gap is not proof of concept but funding and coverage.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

Section Eleven

Practice & Policy

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

Investment	Returns to
Childcare	Children, mothers, and care workers
Eldercare	Elders, family carers, and workers
Water and fuel	Every household member’s time
Care worker pay	Quality and supply of care

The double-dividend argument is that care spending pays twice — once through the service and once through the time and earnings it releases.

It is a strong argument and is not unlimited: the returns depend on there being jobs for the time released, which is a separate policy question.

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.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

The Returns

What care investment buys

Invest in…	Immediate effect	Longer-run return
Childcare / ECCE	Frees mothers' time; care jobs	Child development; women's earnings
Eldercare	Relieves family carers	Dignity for elders; women re-enter work
Water / fuel / sanitation	Cuts unpaid drudgery hours	Girls in school; women's health
Decent pay for care workers	Lifts a feminised workforce	Better-quality care for all

Every row delivers a care and an economic return — the heart of the 'care as investment' case.

Invest in	Immediate	Longer run
ECCE	Frees time; creates jobs	Child development; women’s earnings
Eldercare	Relieves family carers	Dignity; re-entry to work
Water, fuel, sanitation	Returns hours	Health; girls’ schooling
Care worker pay	Lifts a low-wage workforce	Quality and retention

Read the two columns together when making a budget case. The immediate effects are what a finance ministry can verify; the longer-run ones are what justify the scale.

Water and sanitation are rarely presented as care policy and are among the largest hour-returning investments available.

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

Practice step	What it looks like in your work
Count care	Two time-use questions in the baseline
Do not free-ride	Cost the unpaid time your design assumes
Reduce drudgery	Treat water, fuel and childcare as in scope
Reward care workers	Pay, do not "engage volunteers"
Schedule around care	Ask women to set the timing

The second is the one that most changes designs. If your programme needs 200 hours of women’s time, it has a 200-hour input that is not in the budget.

Writing that input into the budget, even at a notional rate, makes it visible to everyone reviewing the design — which is the whole point of the first R.

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.

Policy ask	Which R
Fund ECCE and anganwadis properly	Redistribute and Reward
Extend leave to informal workers	Redistribute
Build eldercare ahead of the wave	Redistribute
Formalise and pay the care workforce	Reward and Represent
Invest in water, fuel and transport	Reduce

An agenda that covers all five Rs is unusual. Most national care policies concentrate on Reduce and on services for children, and stop.

Where you can only push one, push the one with a measurable near-term effect in your context. Recognition first if nothing is measured; otherwise reduction.

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.

ImpactMojoCare Economy 101www.impactmojo.in

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

Takeaway	The question it becomes
Care underpins everything	What does this design assume about care?
GDP hides unpaid care	Is it in our data at all?
It falls on women and girls	Whose time are we spending?
The 5 Rs are the toolkit	Which R does this serve?
Care is investment	Have we costed it as one?

Five questions, askable in any design meeting without preparation. They are the practical residue of the whole course.

If you keep one, keep the third. Almost every unexamined assumption in development programming resolves into unpaid women’s time.

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.

More 101 Courses Explore ImpactMojo Dataverse

Continue your learning

Gender Studies Studio Gender Studies Flagship Gender Equity Game

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0·Free Forever·ImpactMojo 101 Series