Reduce the Burden of Unpaid
Care Work for Improved Women
Economic Empowerment

As the world builds back after the COVID[1]19-inspired lockdowns, the gains made in empowering women before the pandemic must be protected. Reducing the burden of Unpaid Care Work (UCW) is particularly important for the effectiveness of women economic empowerment programs. Thus, investments directed towards enabling households better manage their UCW responsibilities including childcare, cooking, fetching water, and looking after the sick and elderly can yield positive macroeconomic growth (Oxfam, 2018). Globally, while women were already doing most of the world’s UCW before the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging research suggests that the crisis exacerbated the UCW burden (Power, 2020) leading to reversals in women’s economic empowerment. A Rapid Assessment of the Socioeconomic Effects of COVID-19 on Businesswomen in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area of Uganda by the Ace Policy Research Institute (APRI) showed that the allocation of UCW did not change much even in the face of the pandemic during which many men stayed at home due to movement restrictions. The study covered 250 businesswomen working in 10 markets.1 The The study, among others, compared the allocation of UCW between men and women and time spent on different types of work before, during and after the lockdowns. Findings from the study showed that whereas there were some temporary alterations during the lockdowns, the pattern of allocation of UCW between men and women and the time spent on different