If care makes economic participation possible, can it remain a private problem?
That is the question that follows the story of Ama. In the previous instalment of the WEE-Ghana Policy Lens, we considered what happens when a woman receives an opportunity to pursue postgraduate education while still carrying responsibilities for children or other dependants. If Ama leaves her children behind, someone else must provide the care; if she takes them with her, the cost of maintaining the family increases. Either way, the care does not disappear. It is reorganised, transferred or paid for. One may therefore ask: why should Ama’s ability to participate in economic life be a matter of public policy rather than a private affair? It is precisely because women’s economic participation contributes to the wider economy and society
Care is work, even when nobody gets paid for it
Care requires time, effort and resources. It includes the activities involved in caring for, raising, nourishing and supporting people. Unpaid care work usually occurs within households and is often treated as something that happens outside the economy. However, unpaid care work is critical to the functioning of the economy. It enables people to study, work and participate in economic life, while sustaining the households and communities on which economic activity depends. This has been corroborated by WEE-Ghana’s research. Yet, because unpaid care work is not normally recognised as employment nor does it directly generate income, its economic contribution remains invisible. In effect, unpaid care can subsidise economic and social functioning without being adequately recognised or invested in. This creates an important paradox: we can describe a scholarship as an investment in a woman’s human capital while overlooking the unpaid labour that enables people, including scholarship recipients, to study, work and participate in economic life. If the wider economy benefits from this labour, should care continue to be treated primarily as a private household responsibility?
When one woman takes an opportunity, who absorbs the care?
Now, let’s return to Ama. If she leaves her children in Ghana, the care burden may shift to her mother, sister, husband or another caregiver; if another woman assumes that responsibility, her own economic activity may be affected, while paying someone to provide care creates an additional financial cost for the household. If no adequate arrangement is available, Ama may decide that the opportunity itself is impossible to take up. The consequence is that an opportunity intended to strengthen one woman’s economic prospects can generate hidden economic costs elsewhere. WEE-Ghana’s discussions also highlighted that women cannot indefinitely absorb additional care responsibilities without consequences. As care responsibilities accumulate over time, stress increases and care deficits can emerge. This matters beyond scholarships, as the same dynamics can shape women’s decisions about employment, entrepreneurship, professional advancement and participation in public life.
So, should the state pay?
This is where the policy question becomes more difficult. Recognising care as a constraint on women’s economic participation does not automatically mean that government should finance every care arrangement associated with a scholarship beneficiary. It raises the question: how can government remove the constraint that care responsibilities create for female scholarship beneficiaries? Public scholarship programmes have legitimate responsibilities to use scarce resources fairly, transparently and sustainably, with clear rules about what constitutes a legitimate scholarship entitlement, who qualifies for additional support and how public resources are allocated. If women are expected to manage substantial unpaid care responsibilities entirely on their own, those responsibilities can constrain their ability to take up the very educational and economic opportunities that public policy is designed to create. The question, therefore, is not simply whether government should pay for Ama’s family to join her at her study destination. It is what forms of public policy can ensure that care does not become an invisible barrier to women’s economic participation? Several policy options could be considered. These might include supporting the travel and relocation of a beneficiary’s family where necessary to enable her to take up the opportunity; subsidising access to good-quality childcare; or providing financial support to households to secure nanny or other caregiving services when the mother is away. The appropriate response need not rest on any single option and could involve a combination of approaches, depending on the circumstances.
From individual support to systems of care
A gender-responsive approach to care requires us to look beyond individual women and individual benefits and ask who provides care, what that care costs, who absorbs unpaid care when responsibilities shift, what happens to the economic activity of those who take it on, and what role households, communities, employers, markets and the state should each play in making care accessible and more equitably shared. WEE-Ghana’s work invites us to understand care not merely as something women do because they are mothers, wives, daughters or sisters, but as work that consumes time and resources and affects who can participate in education, employment and other forms of economic activity. If women’s economic empowerment means more than simply giving women opportunities—if it also means creating the conditions in which women can take up, sustain and benefit from those opportunities—then care cannot remain invisible.
Beyond the scholarship question
The scholarship debate is therefore useful not because it gives us a simple example of what government should or should not fund, but because it exposes the limits of treating women’s economic opportunities as if they exist independently of the care systems around them. A scholarship can pay tuition, provide a stipend and open the door to a new qualification and a new career, but it cannot, by itself, answer the question of who provides care. That requires a broader policy conversation, one that recognises a fundamental reality, which is, care is not the opposite of economic activity; care makes economic activity possible. The challenge for women’s economic empowerment is therefore not to choose between care and opportunity, but to build care systems in which responsibility is shared across households, communities, employers, markets and the state, so that women can pursue economic opportunities without having to carry the care burden alone The question raised by Ama’s story is ultimately much bigger than scholarships: what would a care system look like if women’s time, labour and economic participation were treated as things worth protecting? That is where a gender-responsive care agenda begins.
Ama is a composite character used to illustrate the care-related policy questions raised by the scholarship debate; she does not represent any individual scholarship beneficiary