The WEE-Ghana Project has organised a convening on Care Policies and their Implications for Women’s Economic Empowerment, bringing together policymakers, academics, civil society actors, and development practitioners to deliberate on how Ghana’s care economy can be better integrated into national policy frameworks.
Held recently at the Fiesta Royale Hotel in Accra, the forum provided a platform to interrogate the impact of care policies on women’s economic empowerment.
An early career researcher on the care component of the social policies prong of the initiative, Dr. Faustina Obeng Adomaa, led the presentation, sharing compelling data that reframed care not as a domestic concern, but as a fundamental pillar of the economy. She argued that activities like childcare, cooking, cleaning, and caring for the sick and elderly constituted essential social reproduction without which the formal, productive economy could not function.
“The fact that these reproductive things are done is the reason why we have what we call the productive economy,” Dr. Obeng Adomaa stated. “Unpaid care work subsidises the entire economic system.”
Despite its central role, the researcher noted that care work—largely invisible in national accounts—remained a critical barrier to women’s economic participation.
“Women continue to bear a disproportionate share of unpaid care responsibilities, which affects their ability to engage productively in the labour market,” she said.
Drawing on both global and local data, she revealed that 76% of unpaid care work was performed by women, with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimating that globally, 708 million women were outside the labour force due to care responsibilities. In Ghana, time-use data showed that women performed an average of 3.78 hours of unpaid care work daily, compared to 1.1 hours for men, resulting in longer and more demanding total workdays.
Crucially, Dr. Obeng Adomaa argued that these stark figures likely underestimated the true burden. She highlighted what care researchers called “child-minded” or “home-minded” work—the constant mental load of managing a household and family needs even in one’s physical absence.
“This constant mental load—the care work you perform in your mind even when you’re not there—is an invisible burden we can no longer ignore,” she explained. “If you are here this morning and your child is sick at home, you are likely to call two or three times to check in. This cognitive burden is not captured by simply counting hours of physical tasks.”
Other insights from nearly two years of desk research and preliminary field data were equally instructive. While Ghana’s national policies on childcare, health, ageing, and disability were found to be well-framed, implementation gaps persisted. The National Inclusive Education Policy was cited as a case in point. “Every single school you go to in this country is totally unprepared to take care of a special [needs] child,” Dr. Obeng Adomaa reported. “Meanwhile, the inclusive education policy was to enable these children with disabilities or special needs to be integrated into the regular school system. So for children with disability, the only place that can offer care is the home.”
Similarly, her findings identified significant challenges with the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), where chronic underfunding and limited coverage forced patients to pay out-of-pocket for drugs. She also noted a trend of shortened hospital stays, which shifted the burden of post-operative and critical care from health facilities back into households—a responsibility that fell disproportionately on women.
The presentation sparked a vibrant plenary session as participants connected the findings to lived realities.
A healthcare professional pushed back on assumptions about the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and its role in hospital discharge decisions, clarifying that, “ “Insurance does not come in to play at all in determining how long a woman stays on the hospital bed. The fundamental test is: is the patient better? Can the bed be available for the next patient? You have to save that life.”
However, other participants echoed the research’s findings on the NHIS’s limitations. One woman shared a frustrating personal experience: “I had an NHIS card, and it was so frustrating at the end of the day, I went to a pharmacy shop and when they asked me whether I was using NHIS, I said no, I’m paying cash. Suddenly the drug appeared.”
A representative from Ghana Federation of the Disabled, articulated the need for structural support for persons with disability, shifting the burden from families to the state: “Forgive me, I did not create the open gutters for which reason I can’t go out by myself. It is the government that creates all these things and causes the barriers. By asking for policies to redistribute the onus to government institutions, we help reduce the burden on our families.”
As the way forward, the research advocated for the transformative 5R Framework to reshape the care economy: Recognise the economic value of unpaid care work; Reward paid care work with fair compensation; Redistribute care responsibilities more equitably to men, the state, and the market; Reduce the burden through investments in time-saving infrastructure; and Reclaim care as an essential public service.
Wrapping up, one theme was distinct – “The message is clear: we need to value care work,” the lead presenter advocated. “And that starts by ensuring the burden doesn’t fall on women alone.”
The WEE project based at the University of Ghana is a three-year project designed to achieve a critical mass of economically empowered women. A major outcome of this project is to build a network of policymakers sensitive to the gendered impact of policies and dedicated to the development and implementation of gender responsive policies that will lead to women’s economic empowerment. This meeting – the fourth of six convenings planned over the lifetime of the project offered a space for continued discussions towards this goal.
Click here to view the Photo Gallery of the event