UNRISD Research and Policy Brief 9

Why Care Matters for Social Development

Care work, both paid and unpaid, contributes to well-being, social development and economic growth. But the costs of providing care are unequally borne across gender and class. Families in all their diverse forms remain the key institution in meeting care needs. The challenge is to forge policies that support them and are grounded in certain key principles: recognize and guarantee the rights of care-givers and care-receivers; distribute the costs more evenly across society; and support professional, decently paid and compassionate forms of care. Care underpins social and economic development, yet arrangements for its provision in developing countries have been little studied.

February 2010

The Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, are a set of orientations to help to inform policy and practice and encourages States to take the Guidelines into account and to bring them to the attention of the relevant executive, legislative and judiciary bodies of government, human rights defenders and lawyers, the media and the public in general.
Published: 2010

Turning crisis into opportunity for children affected by HIV and AIDS: responding to the financial, fuel and food crises

 

There has been no comprehensive review of the impacts of  the financial, fuel and food crises on children and caregivers affected by HIV and AIDS. This is critical, given that the mortality rate among infected children is disproportionate to that faced by adults, and that relatively fewer children have access to necessary antiretroviral therapy (ART). There is a risk that children living with the disease or highly vulnerable to infection will remain invisible in the crisis unless they receive urgent policy attention.

This paper examines the influence of the nature of mothers' work on Nepali children's schooling outcomes. Using nationally representative cross-sectional data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS), it analyses whether the engagement of mothers (and fathers) in nonagricultural work has significant consequences for their children's school attendance and grade attainment, compared with these consequences when parents' work is in traditional subsistence agriculture.

This paper examines the hypothesis that increases in public expenditure which  translate into benefits for children have a positive impact on economic growth  and a negative impact on inequality. This may be due to the avoidance of  irreversible disadvantage to a person's future productivity, mitigation of the intergenerational transfer of poverty, and reduction of future costs to health, education and social welfare systems.