Who Cares? The Role of Families, States, Markets and Communities in Care Provision: New Evidence from UNRISD Research

Using new case study evidence from Tanzania, India and Nicaragua, this session draws attention to care arrangements and policies in low-income countries, where widespread poverty, limited public budgets and weak state capacity place serious constraints on the functioning of both states and markets in welfare and care provisioning.

Poor families - and women in particular - not only bear primary responsibility for household survival under labour market conditions that do not provide sufficient employment and/or income, but also receive little or no support for unpaid care provisioning. The presentations will address how families and households - especially women and girls within them - cope with and respond to the intense care demands placed on them by relatively high fertility rates and (in the case of Tanzania) high incidence of HIV/AIDS. They will present evidence on the ambivalent role of the state in these contexts in providing infrastructure, health and education services, and other state programmes more explicitly geared to care-giving (home-based care in Tanzania, preschool education/care facilities in Nicaragua, and anganwadis in India).

The event will take place at the Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium, United Nations Headquarters, New York, on Wednesday 4 March 2009, from 13.15 to 14.45.