‘Who Cares’: Reflections on the International-level Advocacy Work of the Unpaid Care Work Programme (2012–2015)

Abstract

At the end of September 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be launched. Building on the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were officially established in 2000, the SDGs will potentially have 17 goals – one of which was explicitly absent from the MDGs: the unpaid care work of women and girls. The inclusion of unpaid care work in the final outcome document of the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, which was made possible through the collective efforts of researchers, women’s rights organisations, activists and supportive policymakers, reveals just one of the ways in which unpaid care work is increasingly, albeit slowly, being recognised in development discourse, programmes and policies (United Nations General Assembly 2014b). In this Evidence Report we outline the global-level advocacy work undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and our partner, ActionAid International, over the course of a four-year programme to make care visible.