Transforming care, guaranteeing rights

Every day, women and girls in Latin America dedicate up to three times more hours to unpaid care work than men: cooking, cleaning, caring for children, assisting the sick, and caring for the elderly. Globally, 12.5 billion hours are spent every day on unpaid care work, primarily performed by women and girls, often without rest or compensation.

Latin America and the Caribbean is transforming the way care is addressed, promoting structural changes that could lead to care shifting from a private burden to a public policy focus on well-being, democracy, and sustainability.

In the Latin America and Caribbean region, UN Women is working with 17 countries to redesign the recognition, financing and development of care, hand in hand with the territories, spaces where collective, community, public and innovative responses are built to redistribute unpaid care work and ensure that all people can care and be cared for in good conditions throughout their lives.

In this process, UN Women promotes strategic alliances among local governments, feminist organizations, donors, universities, and municipal networks.  

Care is increasingly being positioned as a priority, and as such, it is on the agenda of international forums, such as the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, and is the central theme of the 16th Regional Conference on Women. There will be no fulfillment of the SDGs without robust, accessible, and sustainably financed care systems and policies.

From UN Women, in partnership with the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), we promote the regional program "Transforming economies. Towards the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid domestic and care work in Latin America and the Caribbean", with a regional perspective and specific emphasis on Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Panama and the Dominican Republic, to strengthen the design of care systems with a territorial, gender and human rights approach.

In this editorial special we present initiatives that reflect the advances in care in the territories, in Brazil with the Ver-o-Cuidado project with the support of Open Society Foundations, in Chile, in Colombia with the Entornos que Cuidan project, in El Salvador with the MELYT project, financed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) through the Italian Agency of Cooperation for Development (AICS), in Panama with the Territorios que Cuidan project, with the support of SISCA, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in Peru with the project "Transformando las Economías del Cuidado, with funding from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and in Uruguay with the Elsie Project, financed by the Elsie Initiative fund.