Labour of Love or Unpaid Labour?
In 2024, Tiny Totos embarked on a 2-year action research undertaking funded by IDRC and supported by the Population Council, designed to determine if and why our care model reduced the burden of unpaid care on women, invest in making the model better, and to share learnings from this process.
The aim of this paper is threefold:
- To consider if Tiny Totos’ improved care delivery has an impact on caregivers’ and mothers in informal communities’ ability to work and earn.
- To assess whether efforts to improve the model’s impact by investing in qualitative improvements – namely enhancing user engagement and ownership of the network through technology, communication and leadership opportunities – improved quality and depth of impact.
- To review learnings emerging from the process, which indicate that communities of care can go beyond reducing women’s care burdens, to amplifying livelihood opportunities for marginalized women through the experience of collective identity and action. The evidence suggests that when women come together in an empowered, self-reliant network, the alchemy of community catalyses further innovation to magnify time and livelihood benefits for members, often in unanticipated ways. Innovations that prove community caregivers and mothers were never helpless beneficiaries but agents of resilience and entrepreneurialism. Implementors’ role has never been to dictate or direct, but rather to promote, catalyse and dignify the creativity of intrepid, resourceful community-based caregivers.