Care Economy Campaign

Just Care Economy Advocacy Campaign (JCEA)

Campaign Background: Grassroots women have long been on the frontlines, offering vital care, support, and guidance to individuals and families facing crises such as HIV and AIDS, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate-induced disasters. Their resilience and commitment have filled critical gaps left by inadequate government responses. As crises and pandemics become the new norm, care remains essential—and so must our recognition of grassroots women caregivers. These women play a crucial role in sustaining households, communities, and ecosystems, yet their contributions often go unrecognized and uncompensated. The pandemic underscored the disproportionate care burdens they bear, highlighting the urgent need to transform the current care system. A just care economy must value, recognize, and compensate grassroots women for their indispensable and courageous work.

Transforming Care: Demands for a Just, Equitable, and Inclusive Economy

Ensure decent work and social protection through comprehensive policies and tools that provide grassroots women community caregivers, domestic workers and other low paid care workers access to healthcare, income supplements, social security, retirement benefits, and affordable social housing.
Compel nation-states to guarantee essential services and infrastructure for life such as water and sanitation, good quality public services, without these services, care cannot be guaranteed.
Provide access to productive capital - including land, credit, technology, internet and equipment; and invest in training and capacity building and other livelihood strengthening initiatives that produce equitable opportunities to access better markets and value chains and advance our economic independence.
Recognize and value care for the environment and natural resources, and protect the ancestral knowledge of our cultures.

Recognize the constituency of local grassroots women caregiver organizations, in their diversity, as essential workers and agents of development.
Publicize the scope and value of grassroots women community caregivers’ contributions to foster local and national economic development and the overall economy, and ensure the national GDP incorporates care work.
Develop and implement innovative policy and program frameworks that create sustainable revenue streams to compensate caregivers’ organizations, finance underpaid work and women's organizing campaigns for economic justice.
Promote and secure the inclusion of grassroots women caregiver organizations and leaders in decision-making processes related to social and economic policy and program development and budgeting (especially those tied to post-COVID-19 recovery/stimulus plans, poverty reduction, and social protection investments to assist marginalized workers) at all levels of government)

Advocacy Actions to Advance a Just Care Economy

Implement joint policy advocacy efforts and promote public dialogues (locally/regionally/ globally), to amplify the voice and agency of grassroots caregivers in decision-making processes that shape the care economy, including in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
Secure flexible direct funding for grassroots women’s community caregivers’ organizations and their networks to sustain their operations, accelerate organizing and advocacy efforts and transfer good practices nationally, regionally and globally
Implement effective strategies and practices and adapt existing tools, such as social protection, to deliver strategic outcomes that ensure grassroots caregivers are adequately supported, empowered, and integrated into economic and social development initiatives
Develop grassroots policy and normative frameworks and partner with multilateral organizations in order to ensure decent caregiver earnings as well as the right to care
Valorize Grassroots Community Caregivers Work through compelling case studies and short videos; and collaborate with experienced feminist researchers to co-develop time use and other evidence gathering survey and data collection methodologies that capture the labor time and qualitative skills grassroots women’s community caregivers apply in their work (in crisis and non-crisis times)

Goal of the Campaign

To Advance immediate practical actions that respect, resource and compensate local caregiver constituencies and organizations for their leadership in fostering caring society and just