WE-Care Malawi Programme Report
Linking unpaid care work and mobile value added services in Malawi
Around 75 percent of the world’s total unpaid care work, including housework, water and firewood collection and caring for people such as children and the elderly, is performed by women. To fully promote women’s rights and to move towards greater substantive equality between women and men, there is a need to tackle the inequalities created by unpaid care workloads that are heavy and unequal. Based on this belief, Oxfam GB, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has implemented the Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) programme, which aims to build evidence for in influencing change on care work in six countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In Malawi, the programme implemented three different research methodologies that included qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as participatory research to generate a strong evidence base for awareness raising and policy advocacy at the national and global levels. The programme was designed to be closely interlinked with the GSM Association’s mNutrition programme, which is a three-year multi-country programme, for which Oxfam is the lead partner in Malawi for content development. The WE-Care programme in Malawi also focused on the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for data gathering, analysis and implementation of a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).