Juhi Kasan, Project Lead: Care Economies
On 1 July 2025, I had the honour of moderating a session titled “Situating the Current Landscape of Care” as part of the official pre-event to the G20 Women’s Empowerment Working Group. The session brought together global experts to reflect on where we stand in the care economy, and what must happen to move beyond rhetoric toward transformation.
Opening the session, I reflected on the five years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that moment of crisis, the vital role of care was made starkly visible. Care workers, from health professionals and domestic workers to ECD practitioners and transport operators, were rightly recognised as essential. But five years on, we must ask ourselves: has this visibility translated into structural change?
The truth is, we remain in the midst of a global care crisis. Rising care needs, driven by demographic shifts, inequality, and chronic underinvestment in care, continue to outstrip the capacity of systems designed to deliver support. According to the ILO, women perform 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work daily. That’s equivalent to two billion people working full time, without pay. An estimated 708 million women remain outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities. These figures speak to the staggering scale of the issue, and the cost of inaction.
This session invited us to take stock, and three esteemed speakers joined me to do just that.
Emanuela Pozzan, Senior Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination Specialist at the ILO, reminded us that while policy frameworks on care have gained traction, implementation remains patchy, especially where fiscal constraints and weak enforcement persist. She called for better alignment between labour and social protection systems to support both paid and unpaid care work, and highlighted the critical role that platforms like the G20 must play in financing and coordinating national-level change.
Lerato Shai, labour economist and ECD advocate, underscored the centrality of early childhood development to the care economy. She reminded us that ECD is not just a social good, it’s an economic strategy, with direct links to employment creation, poverty reduction, and gender equity. But without targeted public investment, the sector will remain under-recognised and under-resourced. She called on the G20 to place ECD firmly on its agenda as a pillar of human capital development.
María Noel Estrada (UNRISD) brought a powerful intersectional lens to the conversation, reminding us that care systems cannot be built in isolation from other structures, whether climate policy, labour regimes, or social protection. She called for care to be treated as a foundational pillar of economic justice, and for national planning to break out of its siloed logic and reflect the complexity of people’s lived realities.
Throughout the discussion, one thing was clear: symbolic recognition of care is no longer enough. The political moment demands that we build care systems that are publicly supported, equitably financed, and designed with the realities of women and all caregivers at the centre. It also demands that we reframe care not as a cost, but as a social and economic investment, one that underpins collective wellbeing and shared prosperity.
As the Care Economies Project at IEJ continues its work in South Africa and globally, this session affirmed the importance of intersectional, collaborative, and politically courageous approaches. The road ahead will require coordinated advocacy, sustained pressure, and grounded policy solutions, but I left the conversation with renewed clarity on what’s at stake and what’s possible.