Reimagining care policy through collaboration: Insights from The Motherload Virtual Symposium
How can we design care policies that truly work for women in the majority world? This was the guiding question behind Recognising The Motherload: Thinking through Complexity and Sharing Transformative Policy and Practice, a virtual symposium hosted by The Motherload Project.
The symposium took place online on 20 November 2024 and was co-hosted with Flourish, a South African women’s rights organisation focusing on eradicating stunting and The Motherload Project’s civil society partner.
The virtual symposium brought together feminist academics and activists from South Africa, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago to share grounded insights and co-create strategies for recognising, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work. What emerged was a powerful case for deeper collaboration among countries in the Global South, an approach that centres the lived realities of caregivers and draws on context-specific knowledge to shape care policy that is truly transformative.
South-South solidarity as a pathway to innovation
A key theme running through the symposium was that collaboration among Global South countries can be deeply fruitful. While caregiving practices differ across contexts, many countries in the South face shared challenges: weak public services, entrenched patriarchal norms, and the legacy of colonial systems that undervalue women’s labour. These overlapping struggles make virtual gatherings like The Motherload symposium important tools for addressing systemic care crises.
Participants stressed that Global North policy models, while useful as references, cannot simply be copied and pasted into Global South contexts. Instead, what’s needed are care policies designed with specific local realities in mind. In aid of this, sustained exchange between researchers, practitioners, and communities in the South is immensely valuable – sharing what’s working, what’s not, and why.
As several speakers noted, some of the most effective care policies globally, such as Bogotá’s integrated Care Blocks, emerged from collaboration between feminist academics and civil society organisations. These partnerships succeeded in politicising care, framing it as a public issue, and ensuring that marginalised voices were central to the design and implementation of policy.
Beyond paper promises: Bridging policy and practice
The symposium also revealed that while many countries have care-related policies in place, there is often a striking gap between what’s promised on paper and what’s delivered in practice. For example, Konjit Hailu Gudeta, Assistant Professor at Addis Ababa University, highlighted how, in Ethiopia, childcare policies do not currently include children under the age of four, leaving a critical gap for working mothers. In South Africa, despite progressive social policies, fragmented service delivery often deepens the care burden instead of lightening it.
This disconnect, presenters argued, arises when policies are developed without adequately engaging the people most affected, especially low-income mothers who carry heavy burdens of care work. The Motherload Project has shown that top-down approaches to policymaking often exacerbate the very conditions they aim to improve. What’s needed instead is people-centred design: policy developed with, not just for, caregivers.
A collective future
The symposium underscored that care is not just a private matter – it is a shared social responsibility that requires coordinated, collective action. By making space for feminist thought, lived experience, and transnational solidarity, The Motherload symposium marked an important step in reimagining care economies from the ground up. In a world where too much care work goes unrecognised, this kind of collaboration offers a hopeful and necessary path forward.