It is widely recognised that successful efforts to promote women’s economic empowerment not only impact incomes but also build self-confidence, enhance women’s agency, and contribute to improved education, health and security outcomes for families. Nevertheless, interventions designed to support women to participate in productive or paid work – either as business owners or employees – are often based on assumptions around the elasticity of women’s time. They fail to disaggregate household roles and responsibilities, or to recognise care responsibilities outside the paid economy.
To date there is little published material available to support market systems programmes to understand and address unpaid care work. This document fills that gap by providing guidance to practitioners on approaches to diagnose constraints related to unpaid care; provides tools to carry these out; and outlines with real examples how programmes have designed interventions to target problematic aspects of care provision based on facilitation approaches using systems thinking. The knowledge is based on the insights produced together with a community of practitioners, donors and experts from both the gender and markets systems fields, and practical programme experiences.
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