A Four-Part Series on Redistribution, Reform and Women’s Economic Empowerment
Ghana is rethinking its labour laws. As of early 2026, the proposed Labour Bill seeks to extend maternity leave beyond the current twelve weeks and formalise paternity leave nationwide. While the bill remains under review, one thing is clear: caregiving has moved to the centre of labour policy debate.
Care refers to the activities required to sustain individuals and households. These include childcare, caring for the elderly and sick, cooking, cleaning, household management and other forms of unpaid domestic and reproductive labour. These activities sustain families and communities and make participation in the market economy possible, yet they are often treated as private responsibilities rather than matters of public policy.
This reform moment raises a deeper question. When leave policies change, who adjusts? Who bears the cost? Who gains protection — and who remains exposed? In other words, how is care shared across households, workplaces and the state?
Across this series, we reflect on how the current maternity and paternity leave debates intersect with deeper structural questions about care responsibilities, financing, informal sector inclusion and public investment in care. Each instalment situates WEE-Ghana’s research and stakeholder convenings within the evolving national policy conversation.
In this series, we return to the questions first raised in April 2024 and deepened through subsequent convenings: redistribution of care, informal sector inclusion, employer incentives, life-course economic security and the broader policy architecture shaping women’s economic futures.
The question is not whether care matters. It is whether policy makers are prepared to treat it as foundational.
Part 1
Care Is Economic Infrastructure — And This Conversation Did Not Begin in 2026
In February 2026, the Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Dr Agnes Naa Momo Lartey confirmed that consultations are underway to extend Ghana’s current 12-week maternity leave. Proposals range from 14 weeks to as much as four to six months, alongside parallel efforts to formalise paternity leave nationwide. But this policy moment did not emerge overnight.
A year earlier, during her January 2025 confirmation hearing before Parliament, Dr Lartey signalled her intention to champion maternity leave reform as a core policy priority. That announcement crystallised an issue that had long been simmering beneath Ghana’s labour framework. Yet even that was not the beginning.
For WEE-Ghana, the structural tensions underpinning today’s debate surfaced earlier — on 30 April 2024, at the African Regent Hotel, during our inception meeting with 57 stakeholders representing government institutions, employers’ bodies, trade unions, informal worker associations, women’s rights organisations and international agencies. From the outset, a central concern emerged: policies that appear gender-neutral often disadvantage women because they fail to account for the structural realities of care.
The discussion quickly moved from principle to pressure. A business leader from the Executive Women’s Network described the strain her company experienced when several women in management were simultaneously on maternity leave. Although she provided paid leave and flexible arrangements, the financial responsibility rested entirely on the employer.
Representatives from the Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry echoed this concern: women’s reproductive roles are socially essential, yet the cost of maternity protection is unevenly distributed. From the International Labour Organisation, an alternative model was introduced — one in which maternity protection becomes a shared social responsibility through pooled social insurance contributions rather than an employer-only burden.
These were not abstract reflections. They were early articulations of the structural tensions now animating national reform conversations.
At that April 2024 meeting, stakeholders grappled with questions that remain urgent today:
- If maternity protection is employer-funded, does it discourage the hiring of women of reproductive age?
- If leave is extended, who absorbs the cost?
- How do we design policy in ways that protect women without deepening labour market discrimination?
These questions converge around a foundational insight: care is economic infrastructure because it undergirds the functioning of the market economy. Care is the soft infrastructure that supports the functioning of the market economy, and the entire economy benefits from care, not only women.
Women’s economic empowerment cannot be assessed solely through labour force participation rates or enterprise growth. It must account for the unpaid and under-recognised care work that shapes women’s time, mobility and income continuity.
According to Anyidoho and Adomako Ampofo (2015), women’s labour force participation does not necessarily alter the gendered division of labour within households. Their study of Ghanaian bank workers found that even when women entered formal employment, they continued to bear primary responsibility for care work at home.
Evidence from the Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 7 also illustrates the scale of this imbalance. Time-use data show that women spend significantly more hours than men on unpaid domestic and care work such as cooking, cleaning and caring for children and other dependents (Ghana Statistical Service, 2018).
Co-Principal Investigators Professors Abena Oduro and Akosua Darkwah underscored that empowerment is not static. Policy environments can enable empowerment in one period and erode it in another. A woman may achieve economic stability — but lose it when healthcare costs, caregiving demands or weak social protection systems impose unexpected burdens.
This is why care policy sits within WEE-Ghana’s six priority policy areas under social and employment policy. The national maternity leave debate now unfolding does not introduce a new issue. It validates the structural concerns raised in April 2024.
Extending maternity leave, introducing paternity leave and encouraging workplace childcare signal recognition. But recognition is only the first step. The deeper question is whether care will finally be integrated into Ghana’s macroeconomic, labour and social protection architecture — or continue to be absorbed privately by women.
Care is not peripheral. It is foundational to economic planning. The labour that sustains households — raising children, supporting dependents and maintaining daily life — reproduces the workforce on which the economy depends.
In the next blog, we turn to the question of how caregiving responsibilities themselves are distributed within households and societies, and what this means for sharing care between women and men.
Follow the conversation as it unfolds.
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Visuals for the blogs are courtesy of Getty images