If the April 2024 inception meeting established that care is economic infrastructure, subsequent convenings surfaced another reality: care reform requires revisiting long-standing assumptions about who is responsible for care.
At the 2025 Care Policies Convening, an early career researcher working on the care component under the Social Policies prong of the WEE-Ghana project, Dr. Faustina Obeng Adomaa, guided participants through a closer examination of gendered expectations. In framing the discussion, she noted how caregiving is often morally regulated in Ghanaian society.
The remark revealed how caregiving becomes a measure of womanhood. She further observed how early these expectations are instilled: it is common to hear parents scold their girl child about learning domestic responsibilities, while boys are rarely asked the same questions.
Redistribution of care responsibilities, then, does not begin in Parliament. It begins in childhood. If boys are not socialised into care, longer maternity leave may protect women’s time — but it does not rebalance responsibility.
Participants also questioned the biological framing of caregiving. As one noted, caregiving is often assigned to women on the assumption that women are naturally better suited to caring labour.
When care is treated as inherent to women, policy change appears optional. When it is recognised as socially organised labour, shared responsibility becomes logical.
Extending maternity leave recognises women’s caregiving role. Introducing paternity leave affirms that caregiving is shared. As Ghana advances discussions on both, the debate moves beyond duration. It turns to distribution.
Recognition builds agreement. Sharing care strengthens families, workplaces and economies. If care is to be shared more equitably between women and men, policy must reflect that balance — not only in law, but in practice.
Beyond the redistribution of care labour among men, women, boys and girls, there is also the question of what kinds of care and care-related work should be done within households and what responsibilities should be supported outside the home through public and private systems.
The current provision of five working days of paternity leave for public sector workers also raises questions about whether such short leave periods meaningfully support fathers’ participation in caregiving. In this sense, the existing provision risks remaining largely symbolic rather than transformative.
Experiences from other African contexts suggest that longer and better-designed paternity leave policies can encourage greater participation by fathers in early childcare.
And this leads to another question raised during the WEE-Ghana convenings: if caregiving responsibilities are shared, how should the costs associated with care be shared?
In the next blog, we turn to the economic side of reform — examining financing models, employer incentives and state responsibility.
Follow the conversation as it unfolds.
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