Advocates for women’s economic empowerment are urging the Government to invest in publicly funded community care centres, arguing that the heavy burden of unpaid care work continues to deny many women and girls access to education, employment and economic independence.
The call was made at a Public Forum on Gender Analysis of the 2026 National Budget organised by the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) in Accra, where stakeholders highlighted the urgent need to recognise and support the care economy.
Speaking at the event, social researcher Dr Faustina Obeng Adomaa proposed the establishment of community-based care centres staffed with trained professionals and equipped with the necessary resources to care for vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities and the elderly.
She explained that such facilities would provide temporary care services, allowing family members, particularly women, to pursue paid work, education, business activities or simply take a break from demanding caregiving responsibilities.
According to Dr Obeng Adomaa, the absence of accessible care services has forced many women to shoulder round-the-clock caregiving duties, while some young girls are compelled to abandon their education to support vulnerable relatives at home.
“Currently, the bulk of care for these people is in the household. Many women and unfortunately the young girls are pulled out of school to take care of these vulnerable people,” she noted.
She argued that unpaid care work remains one of the most overlooked barriers to women’s economic participation and called for policy interventions that would treat care as a critical component of national development.
Beyond the establishment of care centres, Dr Obeng Adomaa advocated a comprehensive national care policy to coordinate services across sectors such as healthcare, disability support, childcare, elder care, education and water provision.
She said a unified framework would enable government agencies to better plan, monitor and invest in the care economy while ensuring that services are delivered in a coordinated manner.
“The idea of a national care policy is to give an overview of how we are approaching this whole care sector as an economy on its own,” she said.
The Executive Director of NETRIGHT, Madam Patricia Blankson Akakpo, acknowledged existing government investments in care-related services but maintained that current interventions were inadequate to address the scale of the challenge.
She called for increased public spending on care infrastructure and services, as well as a shift from traditional social protection programmes towards systems that directly respond to the realities of unpaid care work.
Madam Akakpo also advocated the introduction of care economy budget tagging and tracking mechanisms to improve transparency, accountability and measurement of government spending on care-related interventions.
The stakeholders stressed that investing in care services would not only improve the lives of caregivers and vulnerable groups but also contribute significantly to women’s economic empowerment and national productivity.
