Reimagining Diverse Care Infrastructures for Just and Feminist Futures

Event Summary

This Women Deliver side-session explores how care infrastructures – both social and physical can be reimagined and implemented to build just and feminist futures. Social care infrastructures include the norms, practices, connections and laws that recognise the value of unpaid care and aim to redistribute women’s disproportionately heavy responsibilities of providing care to their families and communities. These include practices and norms towards childcare and eldercare, community-health networks, solidarity activities and spaces and mutual care practices that shape how care is shared and valued.

Social infrastructures sustain and keep physical care infrastructures working – which, in addition to redistributing care (amongst families, communities, the state/ governments and the markets as four essential pillars of the care diamond), also aim to reduce both the time spent in, and drudgery of, care responsibilities. Physical and material care infrastructures include the technologies and artifacts such as transport, accessible public spaces, resilient housing, energy and water systems, digital connectivity, and health facilities that engineer the conditions that enable women and girls to increase their well-being and flourish. Together, social and physical infrastructures form the foundations of cohesive care mechanisms and systems.

Yet both forms of infrastructure face mounting attacks: social systems weakened by privatization, increased marginality, and political repression; physical systems destroyed or degraded by conflict, climate shocks, and under funding. These crises expose longstanding injustices embedded in current structures – and underscore the urgency of imagining and putting into place alternatives that re-centre care.

This session centres the call to build the vision to imagine bold models of care, redesign and implement sustainable systems rooted in justice and co-create feminist futures. Jointly organised by Africa Cares Together Community of Practice (ACT CoP), and The Clean Energy for Development: A Call to Action (CEDCA) research initiative. Projects within both ACT (19 projects across the African continent) and CEDCA (12 projects across 27 countries globally) approach care from different vantage points. While for CEDCA, the impacts of innovations in sustainable energy transitions have given rise to positive impacts on recognising care and reducing its’ drudgery for women and girls, the ACT projects take scaling care innovations as their central objective. Yet, the connections between these projects are meaningful for the lives and livelihoods of millions of marginalised women and girls, and this is what the current proposal seeks to do.

Speakers will highlight innovations from their respective projects that have led to not only material changes in the lives of women and girls, but also that convey powerful discursive messages regarding the interconnections between social care infrastructures, and sustainable physical infrastructure.

By identifying these cross-cutting material and discursive changes, this session will illuminate how societies can rebuild and reorient attention on both physical and material care infrastructures that are resilient, inclusive, and grounded in collective wellbeing, especially for the most marginalised women and girls.