Families, Women and Volunteers: The Limits of Unpaid Care in Development Context

The past decades have witnessed the emergence of a rich body of literature on the gender dimensions of welfare states, social policy and care. While feminist research on care has made important theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions, it has also been remarkably "local," focusing mainly on the institutionalized welfare states of the advanced capitalist economies. Given this, many of the trends, issues and policies it has documented are not universal. This article draws on feminist debates in the "North" to (re )think care in the "South," where states and markets often fail to create the basic conditions for decent livelihoods and care provision. In contexts of widespread poverty and inequality, precarious and informal labour markets, weak state capacity, as well as poor access to social protection and basic infrastructure, households and families assume a disproportionate share of material and social provisioning. The case of Tanzania is used to illustrate how the legacy of health sector restructuring, along with the additional care needs associated with the HIV/AIDs pandemic, are placing an increasingly unmanageable burden on families and so-called 'community volunteers', most of whom are women. It is argued that the residual social policies, emergency programs and measures aimed at a more equitable distribution between men and women at the household-level are insufficient to address current care deficits. The article closes with a number of policy implications for reducing and redistributing women's care burden in a development context. Adapted from the source document.