Why Must We Discuss Care Work To Achieve The SDGs?

In the wake of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, care work remains as a siloed discussion among feminist groups.

From 30 June to 3 July, world leaders gathered in Seville for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), at a time when mounting evidence made it crystal clear: there is no such thing as sustainable development when half the world’s population shoulder unsustainable paid and unpaid work burdens. The evidence of economic self-sabotage is stark: unpaid care work represents 9% of global GDP ($11 trillion), with women contributing 6.6% compared to men’s 2.4% ¹. The cost of wilful blindness is not only felt in economic indicators, but most and foremost in the embodied experiences of women and racialised people, who bear the brunt of care services with little to no recognition.

With less than five years to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world remains dangerously off-track on SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). At the glacial pace we are moving, the gender gap in unpaid work will not have closed until 2228 ² – a trajectory that reveals not just policy neglect, but potentially wilful economic self-sabotage.

What is care work – and why should you care about it?

In public policy, the concept of care is often used across sectors to describe different ways of supporting one’s wellbeing. Here, care work describes all direct and indirect, paid and unpaid activities performed so that human beings have their basic physical and mental needs met, contributing to their capability development, comfort and safety ³. The unequal social distribution of care, both in terms of who performs care activities and who gets to be cared for, calls for the state’s regulation to ensure it is provided in compliance with quality standards, recognised as a need and a right and redistributed between social actors ⁴.

Although care work is not considered in economic development indicators, it is a social good that sustains and reproduces society, therefore underpinning all development progress. Those mundane activities such as cooking and cleaning, often seen as unproductive, set the conditions that make it possible for one to be involved in income-generating, productive work ⁵. Worldwide, women perform over three quarters of unpaid care work, amounting to 12.5 billion hours of work everyday. If all this labour were financially compensated, it would have added US$10.9 trillion to the global economy in 2020 alone, more than double the contribution of the technology industry that year (US$5.2 trillion) ⁶.

Inattention to care work widens gender, racial and socioeconomic disparities within countries. When states fail in providing care services and infrastructure, women are more likely than men to work in flexible, lower-paid positions to conciliate paid work and unpaid caregiving activities, ultimately giving up on pursuing a full-time, paid position in the labour market if the salary earned does not offset the costs of purchasing care services in the market ⁷.

No less troubling, the unmet need for care services intensifies inequalities between countries. Put simply: when states are indebted and take out loans to repay what they owe, it usually comes at the expense of internal budget cuts on the borrowing side. Those cuts disrupt life-sustaining systems such as health and education, increasing women’s workload, since they are the most likely to accumulate lower paid, hazardous, and part time positions on top of their care responsibilities. While these capital flows may seem abstract and often algorithmic, their impact on women’s lives is concrete and embodied. In a hollowed-out state, disenfranchised women are forced into debt simply to maintain a subsistence-level existence ⁸. Since Global South countries are the primary borrowers, and Global North countries control the financial institutions that decide who gets to borrow and under what conditions, the precarisation of life in the former, coupled with a crisis in care, exacerbates inequalities between the two.

From all talk to concrete action in the aftermath of FfD4

If a state’s priorities are reflected in how much money it allocates to tackle certain issues, the figures indicate that no government has gender equality as a genuine priority. The funding picture is grim: while 97% of total cross-border giving for gender equality in developing countries comes from private foundations, bilateral funding, already negligible in comparison to the budgets of major donors, is expected to shrink even further next year, with $17.2 billion announced in aid cuts. When governments can mobilize trillions for financial bailouts but claim insufficient resources for childcare and elder care, the priorities become clear ⁹. The $300 billion climate finance agreement at COP29 – widely criticized as inadequate – still dwarfs most countries’ care economy investments ¹⁰. At the FfD4, an air levy coalition was proposed, to underwrite the provision of oxygen in 8 countries. This is an internationally agreed initiative, implemented at the national level, where states collect a small tax on every airline ticket sold and direct the revenue toward underfunded areas like global health and education. These solidarity levies offer a promising path for financing the care crisis. Crucially, care itself must be recognised and prioritised as one of these sensitive areas deserving of public investment.

Although it represents trillions of dollars and underpins all social and economic development, care work is often written off – or dimmed – in forums like the FfD4 because it is viewed as a “women’s issue.” As such, the discussion is minimised and confined to women’s and feminist gatherings, rather than included in the arenas where the ‘real talk’ of hard politics takes place. However, when countries knowingly implement policies that shrink their productive workforce, increase healthcare costs, and perpetuate cycles of poverty, it raises the question: are these outcomes bugs or features of current economic models? As the FfD4 draws to a close, we must confront the gender gap in care work for what it truly is: an act of deliberate economic self-harm that traps women and other marginalised groups in poverty and indebtedness, ultimately undermining broader social and economic development ¹¹.

As leaders hop on the airplane in Sevilla back to their countries, policymakers and development practitioners must be firm in advocating for:

At the national level:

• Increased fiscal space for funding gender equality: Governments make money by collecting taxes, which is a stable source of revenue for financing public goods and services. Evidence shows that increasing progressive taxation (ensuring people who earn more pay more in taxes) and direct taxation (collecting taxes from people’s incomes and wealth instead of taxing consumption) could alleviate both income and wealth inequality while raising more revenue for public spending.
• Earmarked resources for gender mainstreaming in public policy: Fiscal policy is not neutral, since it not only reflects political decisions and priorities, but also impacts men and women differently. Policymakers must allocate resources to evidence-based policies and programmes to champion gender equality.
• Recognise, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work: Public kitchens, laundries, full-time childcare and education services, extended paid parental leave, and gender-sensitive policies to improve work-life balance must be put in place to ease the burden of care on families. Care policies must be intersectional in nature, addressing not only gender disparities but also racial and socioeconomic inequalities in who provides care and who receives it throughout life.

At the international level:

• Strengthen international cooperation to prevent tax avoidance and evasion and curb illicit money flows: It is past time for increased collaboration with financial institutions to prevent money laundering and corruption. Besides, improving systems to tax the wealth of high-net-worth individuals, as the air levies will do, and the profits of large multinational companies will ensure taxation is applied more fairly and consistently across countries, creating fiscal space for financing development. Governments should also consider increasing the global minimum tax, currently agreed at 15% under the OECD’s Pillar Two, disincentivising countries to shift profits to tax havens with ultra-low rates.
• Include care in development financing agendas: By pushing for concerted tax reform across countries and increased surveillance systems to curb tax avoidance and evasion, countries are better positioned to finance care infrastructure and value unpaid work at the international and national levels.
• Make financing discussions more inclusive: Democratise participation in forums such as the FfD4, ensuring civil society participation. Facilitate discussions in accessible language, rather than resorting to technical economic jargon that alienates people from real-life, embodied consequences of political and economic decisions.

Conclusion

Policy priorities are reflected in state budget allocations, and it is past time for governments to direct funds toward gender-sensitive policies that ensure socioeconomic development for all. All in all, fiscal policy is not a metaphysical technical discussion, but primarily a political decision with real, embodied manifestations, that exacerbates inequality based on gender and race. To overcome this, there are avenues worth exploring: ensuring tax justice, improving mechanisms for international financial cooperation, and renegotiating foreign debt are some of the options on the table that must be seriously discussed if countries are to move beyond aspiration and arrive at a concrete, action-oriented roadmap.

References

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2. International Labour Organization. (2018). Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_674831.pdf
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5. Chopra, D., & Sweetman, C. (2014). Introduction to gender, development and care. Gender and Development, 22(3).
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8. Cavallero, L. and Gago, V. (2021). A feminist reading of debt. London: Pluto Press.
9. Walking the Talk / Financing for Feminist Futures. (2025, June). The architecture of change: Feminist pathways to financing gender equality. https://f4ff.global/assets/2025/06/WTT_The-Architecture-of-Change-Feminist-Pathways-to-Financing-Gender-Equality_Compressed.pdf
10. Climate Action Network. (2024, November 23). COP29: Betrayal in Baku. https://climatenetwork.org/2024/11/23/cop29_betrayal_in_baku/
11. (Walking the Talk / Financing for Feminist Futures, 2025)