EU-LAC Women's International Network Interregional Dialogues: 'Care at the center of new development models: Challenges and opportunities for the construction of comprehensive care systems in the European Union and Latin America and the 'Caribbean"

Latin American and European countries are taking steps to move from programmes and policies to promote comprehensive care systems. These systems articulate a set of policies aimed at implementing a new social organisation oriented towards caring for, assisting and supporting people who require it, as well as recognising, reducing and redistributing care work - which women mostly carry out today - from a human rights, gender, intersectional and intercultural perspective. These policies must be implemented based on inter-institutional articulation from a people-centered approach, where the state is the guarantor of access to the right to care, based on a model of social co-responsibility - with civil society, the private sector, and families - and gender co-responsibility - between men and women (UN Women and ECLAC, 2021).

In this context, the EU-LAC Foundation, the National Institute of Women of Mexico (INMUJERES), UN Women, and ECLAC, in the framework of the Global Alliance for Care, in their role of generating multi-stakeholder and multi-level dialogues on issues of utmost relevance for the cooperation between LAC and EU countries, propose to develop a series of inclusive interregional dialogues to identify joint opportunities, visibilize good practices, innovative actions, and lessons learned aimed at the construction of comprehensive care systems in Latin American and the European Union at regional, national and sub-national level.

The dialogues will be articulated around the following topics:

Each of the dialogues will address, across both regions, the opportunities, good practices, challenges, and recommendations for an effective inter-institutional articulation in the construction of comprehensive care systems centered on people.

The dialogue series will result in a guiding document that will include key recommendations for building comprehensive systems of care and successful strategies for inter-agency articulation. This document will be an opportunity to identify more efficiently the policies, regulations, initiatives, and actions being developed in both regions on the care issue.

The first dialogue occurred in person on 7th November 2022 during the XV Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean in Buenos Aires. The remaining dialogues will be held throughout 2023 in a virtual format, in Spanish and English (international sign language included) and will last approximately two hours.

Women leaders and representatives of civil society organizations, academics, and public institutions from LAC and the EU who have been designing e implementing exemplary projects, initiatives, and/or policies that have the potential to contribute to strengthening bi-regional cooperation in the area of care will be invited to make presentations.